We Are All One

A bustling maternity ward of baby stars in space: 

The young, star-forming region in the Carina Nebula captured by 

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope 

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Two recent happenings have blown my socks off. The first was discovering the Mexican American poet Ada Limón. She will be our next Poet Laureate and is vowing to use her position to help our nation “become whole again.”^⁠1

"Dead Stars" is the extraordinary poem that first attracted me to her. At the poem's beginning, the speaker and another person are outdoors, pointing out the stars that makeup Orion's constellation. They talk about learning some new constellations, but more than that, the speaker says, they have forgotten their bodies are made of dead stars:

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full

      of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward

      what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

      We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

     No, to the rising tides.

Ada Limon’s poem is a call for action to shake us out of our postmodern malaise. What if, instead, we stiffened our spines to survive more, love harder, and collectively put our shoulders to the wheel to curb climate change; what “if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big people could point to us with the arrows.”

My second epiphany, in concert with Ada Limon’s lyric call for action, happened when the new James Webb Space telescope was unveiled. Right on time, choreographed too perfectly to be credible in a novel, science has indeed “launched our demands into the sky!” This all-powerful telescope is a modern-day totem, which, coupled with Limon’s poem, is capable of restoring the mythic, mind-blowing wonder of being alive back into our myopic, soap opera, ad-infected, pedestrian  lives.

Ada Limon is a visionary like the revered astronomer Carl Sagon who was the first to impress upon us that “we are made of star stuff.” (It’s a fact: the matter in our bodies was created in stars at the beginning of time.) Like Limon, “He wanted people to know, we are marvelous, and our story is too.”^⁠2 Furthermore, “Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return.”  

Telescopes allow us access to that ancient time, the earliest days of our story, to reframe the big questions we’ve been asking about the nature of life. Humans are explorers by nature, and it’s no surprise that we would explore stars, too. As Shannon Stirone has written in the NYT:“For thousands of years humans etched stars on rocks and painted constellations on cave walls. We’ve been looking up, echoing a cosmic gaze that is built into our bones, blood and history.^⁠3”

Inspired explorers of the mind like Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade have long been sensitive to the primal significance of dust and bone. As Eliade has written: "Indeed, for the hunting peoples, the bone symbolizes the ultimate root of animal Life… when they die their "life" is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton, whence they will be born anew according to an uninterrupted cycle…By contemplating himself as a skeleton, the shaman does away with time and stands in the presence of the eternal source of Life."^⁠4 

Now, for the first time, that eternal source has been made visible with the debut of our revolutionary new telescope, capable of looking back 13 billion years, almost to the beginning of time.  It’s virtually impossible not to share Stirone’s sense of awe at what the telescope brings alive:

“galaxies wrap around one another, swinging past and tearing their dusty, star-riddled arms apart in a violent ballet. Stars are born, birthing new solar systems full of planets; galactic glitter sprinkles the screen as if splattered with a cosmic paintbrush. Each speck of light in that image, each swirling swath of color, contains potentially trillions of planets, many of which are like ours.^⁠5

Awash in our discontent from excessive navel-gazing and political posturing, this is a perfect time to step back and share this sacred moment brought into focus by two of our own: a poet and an astronomer. They are confirming what the great mystics have always preached. We should all take a deep breath and soak in the message.

We Are All One.

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/books/ada-limon-poet-laureate.html

² https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/opinion/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-awe.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20220712&instance_id=66497&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=98355&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

³ Ibid.

⁴ Mircea Eliade’s  book, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities—see especially his comments on "bones," pp. 83-84.

⁵ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/opinion/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-awe.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20220712&instance_id=66497&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=98355&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92