beyond magazine

Farewell Pluto

This summer I became the same age that my mother was when she became a widow. I was walking with two nieces, aged 14 and 12, when I realized that they were the age of myself and my younger sister when my father died. And my mother had three more children, ages 17, 19 and 21.

I actually stopped walking when this came to mind, stunned a little by what I could be facing on this birthday. My mother had a Grade 10 education, worked part time at a shoe store, and had just learned how to drive when my father died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her with a 1966 Chevrolet Impala, no money (but, to the bank's surprise, no debt), and a parsonage filled with second hand furniture.

I have a rock on my  bookshelf shaped like a mountain. I took it from Frank's Slide last year. I looked all around and there were no signs saying I couldn't take a rock from the 83 million tons of  limestone that fell off the top of Turtle Mountain in 1903, burying a town in the process. I named the rock "Things Change" - a solid reminder that nothing is solid, that maleability and adapatability are virtues, that faithfulness does not mean a relentless clinging to the ignorance of what was or what we blindly think is. Farewell Planet Pluto. This too shall pass. I too shall pass.           

Revisiting Infinities

We blogged this a couple of years ago on this very day in February. It's worth revisiting. Februaries are always tough and it's helpful to be reminded of mysteries.

First visit here:

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

Then read this:

But to offer him another astonishing prodigy, let him behold the tiniest things he knows of. Let a mite show him in the smallness of its body parts incomparably smaller, legs with joints, veins in the legs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapors in the drops, which, dividing to the smallest things, he wears out his imaginative power, and let the last object which he arrives at become now the subject of our discourse; he might think that this perhaps is the smallest thing in the universe. I wish now to make him see therein a new abyss. I want to paint for him not only the visible universe, but all the imaginable immensity of nature within the confines of an atom. Let him see an infinity of universes, in which each has its own firmament, planets, earth, in the same proportion as the visible world; within this earth, there are animals and finally, mites, in which he'll find again the same things as he found in the mite he started with; and finding again the same things without end, let him lose himself in these wonders, as shocking in their smallness as others are in their immensity; for who will not admire our body, which before was imperceptible within the universe, imperceptible itself within the bosom of nature, and which is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in comparison to the nothing, the smallness, we can't arrive at?

Anyone who considers himself in this way will be seized with terror and, discovering that the mass nature has given him supports itself between two abysses of infinity and nothingness, he will tremble in the face of these marvels; and I believe that as his curiosity changes to admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence then search them out with presumption.

- Blaise Pascal, Pensees