The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

by Catherine Burns

I knew nothing of the Moth, but I agreed to tell a story. It sounded outside my area of comfort, and as such, a wise thing to do.

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

my mom had this philosophy, which was if you take someone’s money, you have to take their advice.

They would say to me, “You’re such a weird kid.” And I would respond by saying, “No, no, no. I’m not weird. Weird has a negative connotation. I prefer the word unusual. It has a certain sophistication and gravitas to it that suits my character.”

“Just walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.”

There was no doom and gloom. There was no gnashing of teeth. There were no tears. It impressed me immensely, this living embodiment of an ancient stoic dictum: accept what you can’t change.

I’m sort of saddened by the loss of my belief in religion. It’s like leaving forever the comfort of your childhood home, suffused with the warm glows and fond memories. But I do believe we all have to grow up. It’s difficult for many. It’s unbearable to the few. But we have to see the world as it really is, and we have to stop thinking in terms of magic. As Francis would have put it, “This is a story for grown men, not a consoling tale for children.”

Jenny said, “I don’t remember you being a bad kid. I think you’re being too hard on yourself.” And I can’t tell if she’s right, and I am being too hard on myself, or if she’s just as kind as somebody raised by her parents should be.

This is what I know. In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.

I saw a specialist every week, though, because I was an elderly primigravida, which is a sweet way of saying they felt I was too old to be carrying my first child.

Never check e-mail on a day off.

All we needed to do now is build a spacecraft, test it, launch it, and fly it 3 billion miles to Pluto. So we did. It worked out. We built a small spacecraft, about the size of a baby grand piano, and we launched it on the largest rocket we could get, an Atlas V. It’s about twenty stories tall. So you’ve got a small spacecraft, a big rocket, and what you get is the fastest spacecraft ever launched—it’s going at thirty-four thousand miles per hour. To put that in perspective, when the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, it took over three days. For New Horizons the spacecraft passed the moon in just nine hours. We were flying. (It’s an unmanned spacecraft, so I mean that figuratively—there’s no one on it.) But it will take the spacecraft nine and a half years to go from earth to Pluto, so we’ve got a lot of time on our hands.

It takes the signal four and a half hours to travel from earth out to the spacecraft, and then it takes another four and a half hours for it to come back so we can hear what the spacecraft had to say. So it’s like a really slow conversation. Imagine you say “hi” to someone, then you go watch three football games, and you come back and they say “hi” back. That’s the kind of data rates we were getting.