(no subject)
"Write about what inspires you, what terrifies you, and what turns you on." - Laurie Bland
If this doesn't inspire you, you are cold and hard inside.
I shivered the first time I heard this, right around the first chorus, a wave of gooseflesh reverberating through my body. Sometimes I try to put myself into the thoughts of other times...and the hardest and strangest to think of is for me, a child after Apollo, to imagine us not having touched the moon. The dragon's pearl, laid into velvet skies, circling with the rhythm of the tides, mysterious and unknowable and distant. "Pie in the sky." "Over the moon." Really, who could say it wasn't made of cheese? It was the apex of the unreachable and beyond...the very defintion of something you couldn't reach out and touch.
Those of you who are my age and a little older...try imagining that. Try putting on those shoes. Now imagine that shattered in a million pieces, through human skill and labor and, as the song goes, "flesh and steel." Try and picture the massive paradigm shift that would involve.
Try and imagining seeing photographs of the Earth for the first time.
I don't know about you, but that whole thought makes me smile and, more importantly, makes me see. That thought, that realization, makes the whole political infight, depression, twisted pettiness and dukkha in all its' damnedable forms...it makes them weak and pale. We walked on the fucking moon. And we could do it again.
It makes me want to write, to run my voice hoarse in proclaiming the Good News, that there is a bright and ennobling thing in us that makes us accomplish great things, despite all appearences. That we could seed ourselves among the stars like Johnny Appleseed planting his trees in all kinds of soil from one end of a continent to the other, so no Moloch or machination, natural or artificial, social or technological, apocolyptical or terrible, could control us. Humanity loosed, the pink poetry of man writ large across the sky, groping towards the good and slouching towards the Star of Bethlehem.
I used to write about big things of the soul. And I can again.
Do you hear me, friends? Humanity is great! People are great! Even in our tiny and annoyed ways, even in the Little Way, we're mag-fucking-nificent! Why not do something awesome tomorrow?
If this doesn't inspire you, you are cold and hard inside.
I shivered the first time I heard this, right around the first chorus, a wave of gooseflesh reverberating through my body. Sometimes I try to put myself into the thoughts of other times...and the hardest and strangest to think of is for me, a child after Apollo, to imagine us not having touched the moon. The dragon's pearl, laid into velvet skies, circling with the rhythm of the tides, mysterious and unknowable and distant. "Pie in the sky." "Over the moon." Really, who could say it wasn't made of cheese? It was the apex of the unreachable and beyond...the very defintion of something you couldn't reach out and touch.
Those of you who are my age and a little older...try imagining that. Try putting on those shoes. Now imagine that shattered in a million pieces, through human skill and labor and, as the song goes, "flesh and steel." Try and picture the massive paradigm shift that would involve.
Try and imagining seeing photographs of the Earth for the first time.
I don't know about you, but that whole thought makes me smile and, more importantly, makes me see. That thought, that realization, makes the whole political infight, depression, twisted pettiness and dukkha in all its' damnedable forms...it makes them weak and pale. We walked on the fucking moon. And we could do it again.
It makes me want to write, to run my voice hoarse in proclaiming the Good News, that there is a bright and ennobling thing in us that makes us accomplish great things, despite all appearences. That we could seed ourselves among the stars like Johnny Appleseed planting his trees in all kinds of soil from one end of a continent to the other, so no Moloch or machination, natural or artificial, social or technological, apocolyptical or terrible, could control us. Humanity loosed, the pink poetry of man writ large across the sky, groping towards the good and slouching towards the Star of Bethlehem.
I used to write about big things of the soul. And I can again.
Do you hear me, friends? Humanity is great! People are great! Even in our tiny and annoyed ways, even in the Little Way, we're mag-fucking-nificent! Why not do something awesome tomorrow?