Cosmic Reflections

“You can have your airplanes, but you miss the wonder of the birds,” my first writing mentor was fond of quoting her Welch coal miner grandfather.
     I was taking flying lessons at the time, and perhaps her concern was that rational side of my brain would usurp the creative part of my mind, as if reason and logic are detrimental to insight and imagination, and wondering undermines wonder.
    Is this what happens to us grownups at Christmas: when our wondering about Santa Claus led us to uncover reality, did we lose the wonder of the season?
    I’ll confess to years of experiencing the darkness of disappointment and disillusionment that descends with December, especially when my self-imposed ‘must do’ list made the winter holiday more of a bother than a blessing. And while my expectations always outstripped reality, I never could quite resort to writing fiction or fantasy to supply what was missing.
In the long run, the real world was far more amazing than anything I could make up. Flying reindeer paled before the small plane I was crawling beneath, trying to understand how the pedals in the cockpit moved the rudder in the tail, and why that was necessary anyway. Smeared with grease and smelling of aviation gasoline after climbing up on a ladder to reach the fuel tanks in the wing, I always marveled that the Wright Brothers believed they could actually get a heavier than air machine off the ground. Even more remarkable was that humans even imagined flying at all: that dream was inspired by the presence of the birds themselves, those surviving relics of dinosaurs!
    Overcoming the gravitational pull of the planet became but a step in journeying into space (with Newton navigating) and then looking back at the earth from our moon’s orbit.
     At that moment in human time the self-reflective impulse begun back in the Pleistocene Age came to fruition: earth’s creatures were contemplating the very Earth itself!
     And as the fates would have it, this first view of our cosmic selves came to pass on a Christmas Eve!
   Could the astronauts have actually witnessed that wondrous moment when the earth tilts back towards the sun and the days begin lengthening again?
I turn to ask that question of my partner, an aerospace engineer who worked on the rocket system that helped make the NASA mission possible. Retired now, he is busily preparing dinner for invited friends. We’ve spent the week buying pots and pans and baking dishes because my kitchen was stocked with anything but; in fact, the eat-in part of the room contains my desks, computers, and bookcases. I’ve claimed it as office space because of the 200-degree view that includes two mountain ranges and part of the Las Vegas valley and Strip.
    Now I sit there struggling to give birth to this piece. Milt stops what he’s doing and comes around the end of the counter, carrying the deep red pillar candle we’ve purchased for our private Christmas Eve celebration.
    Once again he tries to explain the earth’s rotation around the sun, this time by showing me how the earth is tilted 23 degrees (he tilts the candle) and how, as he carries it around me (I’m the sun), the earth doesn’t actually tilt back towards the sun at the winter solstice.

 So no, the astronauts orbiting the moon on that not so long ago Christmas wouldn’t have noticed anything like the tilt or tip we hear about: such concepts are figurative rather than factual, mythical rather than literal. The only language we have to accurately describe what happens is mathematics.
     Well no wonder the astronauts resorted to reading from Genesis for the rest of us! Suddenly I realize at an ever deeper level that virtually ALL of the legends, myths, narratives, rites, and rituals that we remember and re-enact at this time of year came into existence BEFORE we humans even knew that the earth moved around the sun, rather than the other way around!
     From that perspective, no wonder our ancestors worried that the sun could abandon the earth altogether, cease moving around the planet and desist from rising in the east and setting in the west each day.

When/if THAT happened, all life on earth would die off for good and NOT be reborn in the spring.
    No wonder we humans personified the sun as a god and appealed to its many manifestations (Saturn, Balder, Mithra, Jesus) at the darkest part of the year!
     No wonder the sense of holding our breath waiting for the sun to relent at just the last minute is culturally encoded and re-experienced at this season across the northern hemisphere!
   The great gift of the universe’s immutable dynamics always comes through, personified as Hertha, Odin, Santa, and parents, family, lovers, friends, neighbors, strangers: all like angels announcing the rebirth of the Light!
                 How wondrous is that?!