“You belong to the world, animal. Deal with it.”
~Carrie Fountain

Last week William Anders, died, and left this Earth. He had actually left the planet before but as an astronaut on Apollo 8. Anders was the photographer of the photo we now call ‘Earthrise’, the first color image of our home…the place on which we live, travel, work, disagree, war, create, reproduce. The photo was shot on December 24, 1968, a day when those who celebrate would have been knee deep in Christmas preparations. Yet, this photo stopped many of us in our tracks and we paused amidst the baking and the wrapping to glimpse the beauty of this whirling blue sphere floating in space.

In listening to people talk about the experience of seeing this photo for the first time, someone said it was a time that changed how we saw the Earth. This is true, of course. But still others, myself included, would say it changed how we saw ourselves. As humans. As those hurtling through the Universe. As those who are so tiny in the grand scheme of things. As those who are sharing this place…no one more, no one less, all vulnerable, all connected by the very fact that we swim together in this amazing blueness.

The year the photo was taken was 1968, and though I was just a young one, I knew that we were living in troubled times. Our country was embroiled in a far-away war that was tearing our country apart. Protests raged on college campuses and at town centers. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. The Civil Rights movement was at the forefront of headlines that, thankfully, resulted in the Civil Rights Act. Families disagreed about all this, my own included. The Viet Nam War remains the only thing my father and I ever argued about. There was distrust and turmoil everywhere. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And into all this arrived this photo which reminded us that we are all in this together, connected by land and water and gravity that holds us all from floating into the skies. It provided, for those with eyes to see, a profound lesson in humility, in compassion, in reverence, in awe. Some say it helped to strengthen the young environmental movement and gave birth to Earth Day. Yet its lessons continued and continue, to elude us. The blindness to human connection and the threat that division brings is still rife on this beautiful planet. As people we so easily forget or choose to live in denial of all that binds us together. 

Anders death precipitated this amazing image being in the many places we now receive news. Like it did in 1968, it was sandwiched in between the many ways we struggle and are prone to chaos. I was reminded of a poem written by poet Carrie Fountain. It begins:

You belong to the world
as do your children, as does your husband.
It’s strange even now to understand that
you are a mother and a wife, that these gifts
were given to you and that you received them,
fond as you’ve always been of declining
invitations. You belong to the world. The hands
that put a peach tree into the earth exactly
where the last one died in the freeze belong
to the world and will someday feed it again,
differently, your body will become food again
for something, just as it did so humorously
when you became a mother, hungry beings
clamoring at your breast, born as they’d been
with the bodily passion for survival that is
our kinds’ one common feature. You belong
to the world, animal. Deal with it…

Seeing that floating Blue Marble once again gave me pause to ask myself how I was dealing with it. Do I take my gravitational walk each day with an awareness of all those others grounded by the same force? Do I send them compassion? Do I hold all those fractured places, those equally fractured people, near and far in my heart? Do I do everything I am able to honor those invisible lines of connection that I share with my fellow Earth travelers? Do I guard our one common feature…survival? It is the work we’ve been given and mostly I fail but endeavor to try.

You belong to the world. I belong to the world. Blessed be the memory of William Anders who showed us how precious our Earth home is. May we deal with it with as much care as we would offer our children, our grandchildren, the children and grandchildren of all our fellow travelers. And to all those with whom we walk this day, may we spin more graciously as if the very world depends on it. Because it does. 

“Every fragile beauty, every perfect forgotten sentence,
you grieve their going away, but that is not how it is.
Where they come from never goes dry.
It is an always flowing spring.”
~ Rumi

Fragility. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the fragility. It may have started with the daffodils and the tulips. Watching them do the work that must be so difficult…waiting, pushing, reaching, blooming to welcome the springtime. Then there’s the lily-of-the valley in their tiny, whiteness sending the sweetest smell, the first true smell of what will be, into the days of May. And yet, now, for the most part they are all gone. Their fragile beauty is so fleeting. They have been replaced by the brilliant purple and yellow irises who demand our attention with color that dazzles the eye and fills my heart with a reminder of how fragile life is. Each of these blooms have been batted about by the rains that seem to be a daily occurrence and the accompanying winds. And in a few short days, these harbingers of the season will also be gone. Their delicate petals will fade and fall away. It seems a terribly fragile existence.

This rumination on fragility may have started with the flowers. Yet it didn’t take long before the thoughts of how easily things can be broken, can be lost, moved quickly to the human ones we all know and those we hear about across our world. It seems there are so many fragile places, so many broken people that are calling out for hope and compassion, near and far. It is difficult not to become despairing or, worse, retreat to a place of choosing not to see, not wanting to be confronted by it all. The wars that rage across the world, the children wounded, killed, displaced. The abuse of power by the few aimed at the weaker tears at everything it means to be human. How to hold it all?

Of course, even those of us who do not live in war zones also know this fragile nature that weaves our living together. An illness arrives. An accident happens. A dream is shattered. A mistake is made. A senseless act is committed that alters everything. Our lives can change, as they say, on a dime, with no warning, placing the tragedy of surprise in our lap. We would do well to walk around with the message:” Fragile. Handle with Care.” emblazoned on our foreheads.

Fragility is part and parcel of us all. In the face of this, we would do well to savor each moment, each breath, each encounter with another, each glimpse of the glory of Creation that is offered every day. In saying this I am preaching a sermon to myself.  With such knowledge, I want to be comforted by the words of the 13th century poet, Rumi. Perhaps his own life was being visited by turmoil when he wrote: “Every fragile beauty, every perfect forgotten sentence, you grieve their going away, but that is not how it is. Where they come from never goes dry. It is an always flowing spring.” Perhaps Rumi was also preaching a sermon to himself.

In the days ahead, I want to hold onto his words with all my might and do this until I believe it down to my core. Fragile beauty, yes. Grief that comes with loss and brokenness, yes. Yet a heart-deep knowing that there is a river that runs below and within it all that never goes dry and offers an ever-flowing stream of the hope that is spring. 

May it be so.