The next issue - Issue 5 - will be coming out a couple of weeks later than normal. While you wait for the next issue, below I offer some thoughts I’ve been having about the wonder of our here-ness.
First Pictures of Black Hole from Event Horizon Telescope
I'm fascinated by black holes. Do you know each one (to note: there are 100 million just in the Milky Way Galaxy) has a horizon? It's a special kind called an event horizon, defined by Wikipedia as a term in astrophysics describing "a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an observer."
The potential rabbit hole we could dive into head-first is really tempting, but let's talk about a different horizon. A horizon we are all familiar with - one where whatever is beyond its boundary most certainly, and deeply, affects the observer (that's us).
Before we consider horizons, I want to also bring up story. Story, defined in Wikipedia as well, is simply referred to as a narrative or an account. We've all heard the narratives that try to be event horizons - cutting off observers from what's going on beyond the created boundary. The problem is, we are far too connected to be unaffected by one another - especially regarding the stories we tell.
I want to talk about horizons and stories that don't cut loose, but tether.
Both story and horizons are rooted in perspective and experience. Ultimately, how we create our stories and how we see the horizon is fundamentally about our location.
This line where our eyes can see the sky and earth touch creates a focal point of relationship that can make it all - the whole universe itself - seem smaller than it really is. Our Sun is a giant (~109x larger than Earth) ball of unfathomably hot gas, yet because of our location in relation to Sun, this ball of gas is a daily welcoming and warm fixture, making our days and life itself possible.
Our spacetime location in the universe does more than just make our planet habitable, it inspires story between us. This storying is where our experience meets our imagination. What we see at and wonder about over the horizon creates connection of what's in us to what is beyond us.
You know what else I'm fascinated by? Creation stories. Cultural cosmologies. Scientific storying we call "theory" that is built on what we know as we make strong hypothesis about what we don't. As people we have always looked up with wonder and wondered. It's like something within was pulling us…no tethering us to the first line of the unknown stories and musings of not just our existence, but the existence of everything. From this tethering we have made myriad sacred stories about cosmic connection that expresses itself in our specific locale of the universe. We've looked to the horizon 100 million times and knew what touched it also touched us.
The Resurrection of Eke-Nnechukwu by Mikael Owunna
I venture to say I think the horizon is the first line of our origin stories. In storytelling we stitch the Earth to the Sky, making sense of our existence and place in the vastness of the universe. From cosmic eggs to spoken words, cosmologies through place and time have our existence wrapped up in the existence of all that is towards and beyond the horizon. The sea kisses the sunset, the stars touch the ground, and the stories we tell dance with the life of the cosmos.
What of the stories you tell - or hear - when you look out or look up? What narrative tethers you to the cosmos from right where you are? And when you consider what's beyond that line where the sky meets the earth, what bubbles up with hope in you?