Heroes Not Zombies

I looked up as I sat in the garden yesterday and this caught my eye. It’s just the remains of a jet-stream but from where I was looking it seemed to be related to the big tree. I thought it was almost like an eyebrow but then changed to seeing it as an edge.

I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the amazing photos from the International Space Station but the ones of Earth showing a long curving horizon with the blue and green of the planet coated by the thinnest white layer of atmosphere transfix me. I astonished at how narrow that band is. If it wasn’t for that delicate thin layer of gas we wouldn’t exist. Seeing it from the angle of the space station really highlights just how close to the edge we live.

It’s not a huge distance to the edge of our liveable world. One slim canopy, shared by us all, and here we are, changing it. Do we know what we are doing?

While I’m contemplating this idea of an edge I turn my mind to those other photos released by astronomers this week. The ones from the James Webb telescope which show us stars and even galaxies of stars well beyond our previous edge of seeing.

Isn’t there a metaphor in that too? How the edge of our knowledge is always pushed out a little further? How we never reach “the end”? How these edges are not fixed limits?

Then the focus of my mind returns from Outer Space to my garden and I let my gaze run along trees which grow along every boundary. There’s something deeply pleasing about that ever changing, dynamic, living edge. I’ve only experienced one winter, one spring and one summer so far. I wonder what it will look like in the autumn? However, I already feel deeply at home here, and this living edge around me seems to caress me, to wrap its arms around.

I feel welcome here….on Planet Earth. It’s special.