Transcending

Greetings Beloved Soul Travelers,

 Every month, for the Linn Academy newsletter, we pull an oracle card.  This month the card is the Transcending card.  The card shows a Pegasus on the verge of ascending to the heavens. Every month I write about what emerges in my heart, as I look at the card for the month.  However for this newsletter,  I decided to send you a quote. It is a meaningful quote from one of my favorite authors.  To me this quote speaks of transcending the current chaos that the world seems to be in. In this quote Carl Sagan, a world famous astronomer, is talking about an image of earth that NASA’s Voyager sent back to earth, February 14, 1990, on its journey through space. (The earth looks like a tiny blue dot in the distance.) 

Whenever I need to transcend the chaos in my own life or in the world, I imagine that I’m looking at our cherished “pale blue dot” and then send love to us all. 

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

– Carl Sagan

Love,  Denise