Overhead, the stars are falling, alabaster streaks ephemerally etched
on the night sky. So very long ago, Comet Swift-Tuttle passed our way,
its long tail leaving remainders of itself, like white cat fur on
passing black slacks. Now every year we swing around the Sun to cross
the tail again and the sky puts on its own fireworks display as the
Perseid meteor shower.
Our worlds intersect, our spinning planet in a dance around its star,
and the path of a deteriorating chunk of space rock that flames out in a
million dazzling white streaks. The intersection is where life is, the
combustion that fuels evolution on all levels, where two disparate
things come together, how all life begins. Millenium ago, meteors
pierced the atmosphere and scattered their organic elements into the
ocean to trigger life. Later fish with gills and lungs crawled out of the tidal pools and intersected with the shore.
America is the
intersection, where the great Eastern forest meets the vast Great
Plains, where the desert Southwest encounters the Sierra Mountains that
hug the verdant west coast. Within these shores now live immigrants of
every continent, people of every race, every religion. Every one. It’s
astounding that we can encompass this much.
The United States is not the melting pot. There’s no intersection in
melting. We are the national laboratory where cultures collide, where
people by their rampant diversity are learning to discover and
articulate just what is that commonality. It’s not easy, it’s never been
easy. But the edge is where the action is, the creativity that arises
from leaving your comfort zone for the intersection.
That’s why I see our Moonlady community as so American in its truest,
most idealistic sense. We are searching for the core, what is
authentic, and from there moving into a grand engagement with the world:
thinking, creating, interacting, always curious and eager to discover
that which broadens us into a holistic embrace of life, one of many
edges and intersections.
We count 26 Perseid meteors in an hour this night, some emanating
from the constellation Perseus, a set of stars that appears in the Milky
Way, our name for an outer arm of our spiral galaxy, where it
intersects deep space. In this muddy sky on the rural edge of Dallas’
urban glow, at this time of year the galactic arm stretches from north
to south, diffuse like a high altitude cloud, a long white smudge
punctuated by points of light.
At the southern end of this celestial fog is our grand junction,
where the Milky Way intersects the ecliptic, the plane where the planets
spin around the Sun against a band of zodiacal constellations. The
Milky Way seems to rise like steam from the familiar teapot shape of
Sagittarius. Looking there, we peer away from deep space and into the
heart of the spiral galaxy, into the black hole where intersections
cease in the oneness of a black hole.
