I
wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and
over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.
The light and air about me told me that the world ended here:
only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went
a little farther
there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into
them,
like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow
shadows on the grass.”
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
In this landscape
of the mind,
who could not enjoy
her casual gravity-defying thought,
that image of walking “over the edge of the world”
and floating off into “sun and sky?”
Surely this provocative embrace of sun and sky
captures far more than the screaming joy
of some “tawny hawks” soaring on thermals
and shadowing the earth.
Of
course, this is all baked into our being here,
this habit of tunneling through the night,
star-swaddled, as it were, in a crib of darkness,
partnered in a three-some with the sun and moon
racing around the outer rim of the galaxy
and partying with our sibling planets.
As
for those other simple certainties,
morning after morning,
dawn is there pushing at the tides,
her light combing through the leaves
and throwing westward
the sudden long shadow-rivers of trees,
and then at once flowing back
ever so slowly through the day.
While
slip-sliding along the Milky Way in some spatial pirouette
and dwarfed within a shroud of countless galaxies,
there is all of us
with all our differing voices
marking our passage here on earth,
hoping that it all matters.
And
I may be wrong,
but more than just sailing off into “sun and sky,”
I sense an underlying passion for a cosmic quest,
that sometime wilding and fictional notion
that we are here to self-seed the universe.
*
“It is time to explore other solar systems.
Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.”
Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions,
Chapter 7.
