When I Consider Your Heavens
I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up.
I was fascinated with stars, planets, galaxies, quasars, and cosmic travel. Read science fiction (focusing mainly on the fiction), gobbled up Ray Bradbury’s rocket stories, and begged for a telescope.
Winter nights were best to get a crick in your neck peering at stars and planets, and wondering about time and space.
When I was young, the night sky was dark and crisp, as long as you didn’t look southwest toward Pontiac lights, or the dimmer glow of Rochester to the east. Rarely saw the Milky Way unless we were camping at Holly or up north, and that sight literally took away my breath. To think that we whipped around at 515,000 mph was hard to accept (although it would take 230 million years to make one pass around the Milky Way).
All those ponderings fired my imagination.
“In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote. I agreed with him about leaving the lecture to stargaze, although as I got older, I harvested Borders and Barnes & Noble shelves for books (non-math, of course) about space and time and quantum-jumping reality.
But this is a tribute to nights in the backyard on Caroline Street in the Heights, focusing my lens to try and see the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter. Following satellites and passenger jets and admiring the orange-red of Mars.
Once Carl Sagan presented his Cosmos, I fell in love, (with him, too). Every Sunday evening, I made tea and homemade shortbread to travel the cosmos with him, enthralled with the wonder of science and reaching beyond the obvious.
Shall you and I use the power of the mind,
Unbound by laws or speed of light?
We’ll rise above the clustered galaxies
As we explore the depth of night
And we will go together.
Dad warned me that astronauts had to be scientists first. “You can’t waste room in that cramped rocket,” he said. First douse of reality’s cold water.
In my senior year, Physics needed one more body to stay available, and because my brother really wanted the class, I sacrificed College English to fill the quota.
Should have saved us all the agony. I never got past the Force = Mass X Acceleration formula. “Why?” I asked, constantly. “But why?” Mr. Walton would try to clarify his lesson, but that didn’t stop me. I really did want to know why, but we had no frame of reference between his explanations and my total ignorance. Once, he burst out in frustration, “There is no why!”
Well, of course, there was a why, but I was decades away from learning the answer to that question. Sorry, Mr. Walton.
He must have felt pity and compassion since he did pass me…barely…in the class. You think I exaggerate? When we got to the topic of the Doppler effect (and thank you, Mr. Strayer, for demonstrating it so well by running up the hallway in the junior high, through the science room, and down the hall, hollering the entire time so we could hear the change of pitch in his voice), I was certain I understood. Until my brother asked me about the formula. Formula? There was a formula?
So, my fascination with being an astronaut and traveling the stars was as much a fantasy as the stories I read.
Still, I developed a passion for science, for questioning, for praising God’s creation—and no, I see no clash between faith and science—and appreciating nature in all her forms.
From that early telescope to admiration for the world around me, I thank Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury, every author I discovered, Mr. Strayer, and yes, Mr. Walton.
The Heights was the perfect place to savor the cosmos in all its glory, from the stars overhead to scarlet sugar maple leaves to snowy hills for sledding.
And for cherishing every person in my life, then and now, the gift of each unique life. So, shall we catch a ride on the next comet that slingshots its way around our planet?
Shall you and I now travel back in time,
For a quasar is calling my name.
I want to see the beginning of the sky
And I’m hoping you’ll feel the same
So we can go together.
And thank You, God, for your marvelous handiwork. I’ve accepted that I’ll never be an astronaut, but a poet of His glory is enough calling for me.
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place” (Psalm 8:3)
I was fascinated with stars, planets, galaxies, quasars, and cosmic travel. Read science fiction (focusing mainly on the fiction), gobbled up Ray Bradbury’s rocket stories, and begged for a telescope.
Winter nights were best to get a crick in your neck peering at stars and planets, and wondering about time and space.
When I was young, the night sky was dark and crisp, as long as you didn’t look southwest toward Pontiac lights, or the dimmer glow of Rochester to the east. Rarely saw the Milky Way unless we were camping at Holly or up north, and that sight literally took away my breath. To think that we whipped around at 515,000 mph was hard to accept (although it would take 230 million years to make one pass around the Milky Way).
All those ponderings fired my imagination.
“In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote. I agreed with him about leaving the lecture to stargaze, although as I got older, I harvested Borders and Barnes & Noble shelves for books (non-math, of course) about space and time and quantum-jumping reality.
But this is a tribute to nights in the backyard on Caroline Street in the Heights, focusing my lens to try and see the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter. Following satellites and passenger jets and admiring the orange-red of Mars.
Once Carl Sagan presented his Cosmos, I fell in love, (with him, too). Every Sunday evening, I made tea and homemade shortbread to travel the cosmos with him, enthralled with the wonder of science and reaching beyond the obvious.
Shall you and I use the power of the mind,
Unbound by laws or speed of light?
We’ll rise above the clustered galaxies
As we explore the depth of night
And we will go together.
Dad warned me that astronauts had to be scientists first. “You can’t waste room in that cramped rocket,” he said. First douse of reality’s cold water.
In my senior year, Physics needed one more body to stay available, and because my brother really wanted the class, I sacrificed College English to fill the quota.
Should have saved us all the agony. I never got past the Force = Mass X Acceleration formula. “Why?” I asked, constantly. “But why?” Mr. Walton would try to clarify his lesson, but that didn’t stop me. I really did want to know why, but we had no frame of reference between his explanations and my total ignorance. Once, he burst out in frustration, “There is no why!”
Well, of course, there was a why, but I was decades away from learning the answer to that question. Sorry, Mr. Walton.
He must have felt pity and compassion since he did pass me…barely…in the class. You think I exaggerate? When we got to the topic of the Doppler effect (and thank you, Mr. Strayer, for demonstrating it so well by running up the hallway in the junior high, through the science room, and down the hall, hollering the entire time so we could hear the change of pitch in his voice), I was certain I understood. Until my brother asked me about the formula. Formula? There was a formula?
So, my fascination with being an astronaut and traveling the stars was as much a fantasy as the stories I read.
Still, I developed a passion for science, for questioning, for praising God’s creation—and no, I see no clash between faith and science—and appreciating nature in all her forms.
From that early telescope to admiration for the world around me, I thank Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury, every author I discovered, Mr. Strayer, and yes, Mr. Walton.
The Heights was the perfect place to savor the cosmos in all its glory, from the stars overhead to scarlet sugar maple leaves to snowy hills for sledding.
And for cherishing every person in my life, then and now, the gift of each unique life. So, shall we catch a ride on the next comet that slingshots its way around our planet?
Shall you and I now travel back in time,
For a quasar is calling my name.
I want to see the beginning of the sky
And I’m hoping you’ll feel the same
So we can go together.
And thank You, God, for your marvelous handiwork. I’ve accepted that I’ll never be an astronaut, but a poet of His glory is enough calling for me.
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place” (Psalm 8:3)
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