Astronomical Grief: Space To Heal
Fourth in a Hexalogy
If you haven’t read the first piece in this hexalogy, I highly recommend reading (or re-reading if you fancy) it to orient yourself to the structure and intention of this series. I am not a formally trained scientist, but I do love all things cosmological and find deep joy writing on the edge of what is currently known and just beyond it - that place our imagination can take us that isn't too far down the street from reality. It's a space I've come to call speculative creative non-fiction. Welcome.
Healing As a Pause
"Where is the space for silence? It's kind of a rush to end the silence all the time."
Karla Mendoza
“How often do I need to hear someone say, ‘Hey, it's ok if you just need to heal here for right now.’ Or to create ways to affirm that for myself...just to say, ‘Hey it's ok if you need to take time to heal in this moment, in this season.’”
Rose J. Percy
There is a thing that has been happening...an unintended co-creation here in the Astronomical Grief Hexalogy. It's emerging, and allowing it to do so has been...a ride, y'all.
I'm having these beautiful recorded conversations with fellow writers, and the next "thing" to focus on in AstroGrief is birthed from conversation - not from my own solo pre-planning.
I am enjoying it.
I'm also experiencing it, in real time.
As I was working on this issue, Space To Heal, it became starkly evident that it is what I needed - space, just like Rose mentions above, for healing to settle and root. Like the quiet but crucial establishing of a seed in its soil.
Remember in the first issue where I said we are exploring? Well, here we are doing just that. We are exploring and learning and finding ourselves in the midst of the emerging together. Welcome to the 4th installment of our exploration of Space and Longing.
Space (as in The Cosmos) to Heal
Exoplanets + Imagination
Wounded Imagination as a concept has caught my attention this year. As I pay attention to where my limits are and whether those limits are informed by my experience and desires or informed by someone else's stories and "shoulds"...I find corners, pathways, portals of my imagination that lead me to wider, surprising, often more playful places than what I have been dreaming of.
Astrophysicist and folklorist Dr. Moiya McTier has a very fun podcast (among others) called Exolore where she creates facts-based fictional worlds with different guests on each episode. A marriage of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system1) and folklore, this podcast tasks guests - and often the listeners - to co-create fictional worlds with some scientific constraints that inform how the planet and the life on it exist.
Listening has been a phenomenal exercise in healing my imagination. We do not exhaustively understand the exoplanets that actually exist in space. They could exist in so many ways. I mean come on - they say diamonds rain on Uranus and Neptune2 which are in our cosmic cul-de-sac!
Imagine what else could be, imagine how life can come to be and flourish, imagine...let yourself imagine beyond - even if just a sliver - what you have been handed.
Nebulae + Life & Death & Life
Have you watched the Hulu show How To Die Alone? (small spoiler approaching) In episode one, a character makes a statement about dying that is true and sobering:
There are three kinds of deaths. Physical death, we all know and write poems about. Then there's the kind when people stop caring about you. And the worse kind is when you stop caring about yourself.
These griefs are separate, they are all deaths, and somehow there is a version of life afterwards. Things aren't the same - regardless of the death - they can't be.
I talk a lot about stars dying in spectacular, explosive deaths that send the elements of life shooting throughout the cosmos. I talk less about the quiet deaths, where stars (like our Sun) run out of fuel and shed their outer layers - not explosive at all. There is still second life, though - as the core lives as a white dwarf (vs a neutron star, for instance, that can result from a supernova).
When we tend to life after there has been death, there isn't one way to do it - just like there isn't one kind of death. Death can rip and claw at us, leaving remnants of who we are in it's wake. And somehow, there is left behind pieces that can seed or sustain new life. And sometimes…
Sometimes we tend to death and life at the same time - and I don't understand that.
But I see it - in a planetary nebula, in a supernova remnant, in a star quietly shedding what no longer serves its existence to make space for something new, and the grief that is woven within that process of cultivating life.
Asteroids + Impact
Impacts will happen. They are inevitable cosmically and terrestrially. And not all are the same. Asteroids remind us that impacts can break us apart - and how gravity helps pull us back together.
Some of the collision and reformation processes of an asteroid may feel familiar to our own experiences.
For example, cratering is when a much smaller piece of space rubble hits an asteroid, leaving an indent on its surface. Fracturing is when an asteroid is hit and its whole body fragments into pieces. They don't go far, and gravity pulls these pieces back into a sphere-like rubbly form. Shattering is similar to fracturing, except the energy of the impact doesn't allow the fragmented pieces to come back together; they are pulled out of the forming gravitational pull. Following the shatter, a "family of asteroids" is made.
Just writing this, I need to take a deep breath. It returns me to the yes, and of issue 3 about Mystery. What are the asteroids sharing with us about healing? About being put back together? About the permanent changes impacts make, and what emerges afterwards?
I'm reading a fantasy novel with a lead heroine. There is a point where she surveys everything she has done, all she has been, takes in the fullness of herself - what we may call "the good and the bad" - and something shifts in her. At first, she curls up into herself, not wanting to look onto the parts of herself and decisions she's made that seem shameful. But when she gets a fuller picture of herself, her complexity, her power…she emerges having seen herself in whole. With everything she has born witness to within herself, she proclaims, "I love everything I saw. I love all of it."3
May we have the impacts, the processes, and the space to heal that brings us to self-conclusions of not just acceptance, but of Love.
Space (as in An Opening) to Heal
Feeling The Silence
Out in space everything is silent
There's no atmosphere, so sound
Has no way to get around
-Uncle Apple, Today I Learned
In addition to no atmosphere, atoms and molecules don't exist in a way that could carry a sound wave4.
So space...is silent.
This ends the preview portion of this issue.
The Astronomical Grief Hexalogy will be published with a preview for free subscribers each month of the series around the new moon. A companion post that focuses on The Forces and our anchors will go live on the full moon each month of the series and be available to all subscribers. Audio Conversations with some of our favs - like , , , and (I could go on) - will be available to paid subscribers with a preview for all.
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