We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot

On On February 14, 1990, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission, to turn around to photograph the planets of the Solar System. One image Voyager returned was of Earth, showing up as a “pale blue dot” in the grainy photo.

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.
Carl Sagan the significance of the photo know as A Pale Blue Dot.

Click here for We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot (subtitled).

Well! Yes, I am both camera-shy and cross-eyed and I wield the camera in this family, my friend, so there’s just no turning the lens on me if I can help it. But, I have caved a bit and included some shots of John and me among the random header images – so there you have it. And, I know that one of these is really, quite terribly old, but it was taken very early on one of many beautiful mornings out at our little Estouteville cottage near Charlottesville by my most-favorite photographer (Corey Jo!) right around the time I began to fall hard for the husband-who-would-be-some-many-years-later, and it sort of makes my heart race and I like that, so suffer through it.

As for poetry – oh my! How can you look at that little face and think there’s no longer poetry on the site! I think I just need for my eyes to become accustomed to this so-bright young thing before I can focus on words that take away my breath once again, but those dear post-classic modernist pre-Beat era voices will be back again, I promise. What do you think I read to the little one every night, hmmm? Nothin’ but pop-up versions of Neruda and Rexroth for my baby, of course.

create your own visited states map or check out these Google Hacks.

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity.The room is a “doomsday vault” designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world’s crops. It is being built to safeguard the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies. “If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet,” says Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project.

Mine is hewn out of a mountain on an island and has chickens, too. Or maybe it’s more like a boat shaped like a floating Conestoga wagon.

Gradually, China’s people are acquiring the right to be left alone: as long as they keep quiet about politics, of course

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a “Vegan Community Project.” Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group’s “semi-communistic ideology.” A third indicates the bureau’s interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
New York Times F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show December 20, 2005

Just wanted to share a fuller profile of myself than I have in the past for, uhhh, no reason. And by the way, way to go on the war front, guys! Go get ‘em. Whoever ‘em are … as long as it ain’t me, babe.