"The terrible whorl of the Milky Way shines out
To new-eyes under; glory bears down ton-like;
Ordeal girdles us in. I marvel we live.
Yet live we do in the maelstrom, mites as we are;
On our acorn shook from the Oak, we ride out the dark."
                                            Abbie Huston Evans

Since the moment I first read Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, I have been a fan of hers. I thought I had read all she had written, even continuing on to read her daughter Reese’s books as well. But yesterday while rummaging through our church library, I came across Earth Shine, a book she wrote of her experiences and meditations focusing on humanity’s reach for the Moon. It was published in 1966 and provided a certain window for me to look back at my childhood years and how those of us growing up in the early days of the space program were shaped by the science, the magic, the dream of it all. I remember vividly gathering around the scratchy black and white picture, watching with rapt attention as people…real human beings…were catapulted into the darkness of the Universe. The message was….anything is possible.

The book even contains an account of the conversation between ‘Control Houston’ and the astronauts of Apollo 8. "We see the earth now, almost as a disk….We have a beautiful view of Florida….we can see the Cape…..at the same time we can see Africa." Over and over again, the words were repeated "It is beautiful, very, very beautiful."

And what about their eventual destination…the Moon? "The moon is essentially gray, no color. Looks like plaster of Paris-or a grayish deep sand….The moon is a different thing to each one of us…A vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, great expanse of nothing…..The vast loneliness up here of the moon is awe-inspiring…it makes you realize just what you have back there on earth. The earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space…."

Last Saturday night, I traveled through the farmlands of Iowa. In the fields on each side of the road the bright lights of combines worked long hours, determined to disk the corn under before another rain fall. They seemed like satellites downed to Earth, moving in formation across the darkness On the horizon, the harvest Moon beamed….an burnt orange disk traveling companion. No plaster of Paris on that night…..just the brilliant glow of that far away place we looked toward at one time as the place of far away dreams.

Though science has taken us there….our footprint still might be etched in that ‘grayish deep sand’…..no words seem more appropriate than those of the astronauts…."It’s beautiful, very, very beautiful."