Blog scraps

blgo antioppression crit: buys into oppression dichotomy language is only useful as adit o introspection, pratice is much more judgemental even though most practitioners will say its not membership is subjective, and say to distrust by default, early movement is freedom to to identfy with something, late movement is the freedom not to. need to identify with oppressor

science humility astronomy

"In the days of the frost seek a minor sun" p. 178 "He has experienced the human world from an unlikely perspective. he and I share a viewpoint in common: out our worlds have interpenetrated, and we both have faith in the miraculous" p. 169 from Loren Eisley's The Judgment of the Birds

From unsympathetic eyes, no science is more arrogant than astronomy. To think that we can know the universe, and to replace the dreams and the meaning in the skies with a cold place that will keep becoming colder until it dies.

But I think that there is no more humble science than astronomy. No science has had so much romance imposed on it by the things that we want to be true, no other science has found a starker reality, and no other science has submitted so thoroughly to the facts. They've been pummeled so thoroughly by what they've seen that they will believe absolutely anything. The current story goes, we will die a cold death, the universe is something that is growing and growing at an accelerating rate, there is invisible matter woven into the universe that pulls at the stars to make our equations balance out.

Its all because we get light from things beside the sun. Photons are particles of light and from every minuscule point of the sky that we attend to, we see them sorting themselves out into this part and that part. Out of all the photons on this map, atleast a few of them are coming home. Photons turn as they pass heavy things. Its a big enough universe that some photon from earth has embarked upon the dark journey through spec only to get turned, slowly, over billions of empty years, itself one of many millions of billions of undisturbed photons, all the way around to return to earth.

Somewhere in the sky we can see ourselves. At first we won't be able to do anything more than say "yep, there it is." But imagine finding infinite circuits through space, each providing a fragile broken stream of light from the earth as it was or wasn't 1, 2, 5, 8 billion years ago. All of these pictures of earth are coming at us simultaneously, right now.

I want to see the earthquake that split the temple curtain with one wild man's last cry. I want to watch dinosaurs roam the earth. I want to look into an ancestor's eyes as they look up to God. Not to be God, or to have answers, to be full of no answers, and probably bad news, but love and excitement for the miracles that can only happen when we resign ourselves tot he face that the world is bigger than us, and it can show us mhow much we are imposing on it by making us struggle with how that conflicts with what we are seeing.