I wrote this after watching a lunar eclipse.
Lunar Eclipse
(written May, 2003)
I just watched the lunar eclipse. It would have been nice to watch it from out in the country I suppose, but I live in the middle of town and the countryside is hard to get to. I thought I might be able to see it from my porch, but a large oak tree was in the way. Funny, I am in the middle of the city and a tree was what blocked my view. I went downstairs to the street and found that I had a perfect view from the sidewalk. My truck was parked on the street so I let the tailgate down and sat there. I sort of lost myself looking at the moon while fire trucks sped by with sirens blaring, cars honked their horns, and headlight after headlight passed by me. Some sale somewhere in the city was advertising with spotlights, and a life flight helicopter went over, but still the moon hung there like a penny gumball in the sky. The earth passed between the sun and the moon like it has done countless times before and will continue to do regardless of the billions of little human stories and tragedies that unfold on this planet.
I wonder what passed through the minds of my distant ancestors in millennia past when we did not yet know what the moon was or where we fit in the cosmic scheme. Did they merely pause in their routine to reflect on this phenomenon that their grandparents had told them about but they never quite grasped. Did they marvel when the disk in the sky became a surreal white sphere, its 3 dimensionality hinting at something misunderstood. Were they afraid because they did not understand? Did they lay awake that night wondering where they were?
We are no more intelligent than our progenitors. We are no more advanced in our mental abilities. We know so much because we are born at the foot of the stairs of knowledge built by those before us. They had to build the stairs, it is for us to ascend those stairs and add more height so that our children can climb higher. We have already climbed to the moon. I wonder if the limit of our advancement as a species will be reached when it takes an entire lifetime for the most intelligent of us just to reach the top of the stairs. I wonder what we will be capable of by then. I wonder what our average life span will be. I wonder if we will make it that far. I wonder if people will still be awed by eclipses.
