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by
bud simpson |
November
15, 2006 |
Another
Orbit
Autumnal musings from someone who’s “been
around” a few times
Another fall, another change of seasons and a transition in
palettes, from the greens and blues of summer to the grays and
browns of winter. Time to look back and ahead at the same time.
I suppose fall is as good a time as any for reflection on our
lives and times. I much prefer to survey the past year in October
or November instead of waiting for New Year’s Eve. The
weather is more agreeable, and I can sit outside at night and
look into the deep and distant voids of space. The summer constellations
and the backbone of the Milky Way are disappearing over the
horizon and are replaced by our fall and winter companions Taurus,
Orion and the sisterhood of the traveling Pleiades, sparkling
in the chill dark sky. It is much easier to say your mea culpas
and promises of future corrections to moral rectitude to no
one in particular when you are sitting under a canopy of stars
and feeling more than a bit small.
From where I sit, you can almost feel the plants shutting down
for winter, root-locking their carefully crafted sugars and
starches that will help them jump-start a new cycle with the
return of spring’s warmth and longer days. Our aromatic
roses, so carefully tended all summer, are showing the effects
of the freezing air. The lesser migratory birds have hightailed
it out of town, taking with them some of the exuberance of summer.
I miss the hummingbirds and their aerobatic territorial squabbles.
I wish next time they might take the starlings and grackles
with them.
There are falling leaves to deal with and a couple of half-hearted
excursions with the lawnmower left to try to avoid. Even these
chores don’t raise the sweat that they did just a few
weeks ago. The cold has caused us to once again take up the
annual cause of the furnace and think with dread on the dark,
inevitable winter. We look to omens, fables and almanacs for
hope of promise of lesser battles with the cold and snow. Still,
the changing of seasons will again bring the opportunity for
renewal in the spring. As dim, cold and brown as it may become,
all is not lost – it will again soon be budding green,
wrapped in the bright and pearlescent light of spring. All we
have to do is wait for it. We all travel in endless, connected
looping circles in space.
Since we last saw the deep blue November skies, we have traveled
roughly 584 million miles in a slightly elliptical orbit around
the sun. We have been doing this for 4.5 billion years. “We”
in this sense meaning the planet, not you or me. Humans have
only made 130,000 or so trips around our home star. Still, if
that many frequent-flier miles doesn’t qualify us for
some serious upgrades, what does? I have racked up almost 33
billion miles of space travel since I first saw the light of
day, one orbit at a time, at 65,000 miles per hour.
In a few more orbits, my grandson will graduate high school,
a few more still, and he will have college behind him. As his
total of round trips continues to add up, he may find another
traveler with whom to share his life. I might get to see his
space-traveling progeny, my great-grandchild. Adding orbits
adds life experience to our perspective as successive seasons
pass in proper order. Every trip around the sun is an opportunity
to reinvent our lives for the better, to make a difference in
and for our spaceship home, or at the very least, to stop and
appreciate our place in it all.
I’d like to have at least twenty more such round trips
before I have to stop counting. Twenty more chances to revel
in the spring and reflect on the harsh beauties and the elegant,
if simple, truths at the closing of the year.
Bud
Simpson is a member of the infamous Northeast High School Class
of 1968 and a professional photographer. Learn more at www.budzilla.com.
