Earth Day 2009: Pale Blue Dot

In honor of Earth Day 2009, an excerpt from the exceptional book “Pale Blue Dot” by the late astronomer and humanitarian, Carl Sagan. I only learned recently that Dr. Sagan passed into the Otherworld (though he certainly never would have called it that) right here in Seattle, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Here’s to our Beloved Blue Dot!

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Seven Times Under

Image by Dick Verton
Last summer I was blessed to be able to attend a workshop entitled ‘Awakening of the WarriorSage’. Located in the Canadian Rockies near Calgary, Alberta, it was one of the most intense and rewarding weeks of my life.

On the opening day of the event, our teacher led us out to the shores of the nearby lake where we performed a cleansing ritual, not unlike those performed at Varanasi in the Mother Ganges river. During that time and the days following, I had a particularly strong connection with water, and to this day I can recall the feeling of cleansing and vibrance that came over me as I went beneath the surface of the waves.

The Goose And The Druid

Crossposted from the website of Philip Carr-Gomm, Chosen Chief of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids.

In a recent interview I was asked: Why have you chosen Druidry as your spiritual path?