Alexandersmap

    Tag: Venus

    • Saluting the Ghost Ship

      “I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

      I sometimes dwell in the things that haven’t carried me. Places I might have gone, or lived in, surrounded by people I might have known, as the person I might have become. There’s nothing productive in what-might-have-been’s, unless we use them to set our current sail. This life is just fine, thank you, but the world will always whisper: “Vienna waits for you”, whatever your personal Vienna happens to be.

      Strayed puts this beautifully—these are but ghost ships that didn’t carry us. Sister lives we didn’t live. I know that I’ll never hike the Appalachian Trail or live on a sailboat in some remote fiord in Norway in winter, but that ghost of a me that will never be still drift into my mind in quiet moments now and then. Except they aren’t always quiet. Sometimes I’ll jokingly state that we’re selling everything and buying a boat, or a camper van, or just jetting off to the Vienna that haunts me that day. The people in my life know my ghost ships and roll their eyes, carrying on maintaining the ship we’re on in the real world. And so do I.

      I blame the artist in me. Creative types create alternative worlds all the time. Not Walter Mitty dreams, for we aren’t daydreamers in that way, but whispers of what may be just over the horizon of our current world, or an idealized version of ourselves as the protagonist. I ought to write more fiction, just to release these would-be characters into the world they crave to be in.

      Watching the crescent moon dance with Venus and Regulus in the early morning sky stirred up the ghost ship once again. Looking westward, Jupiter was dipping towards the west. It was magic time, when the universe whispers to the few cherished souls who awaken to be part of it that life is full of possibility. We may choose and love the ship we’re on for this passage while admiring the ones that slip away to the horizon. Some things will never be in this lifetime, but ’tis a beautiful life we’ve built for ourselves nonetheless, don’t you think?

    • Life on Venus

      “Apparently it smells basically like death… It just smells horrific. We once, I think, found a report of someone saying it smelled like the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.” – Clara Sousa-Silva, NPR interview

      Life on Venus? Not exactly, but life swirling about in the clouds of Venus is apparently a very real possibility. That there’s a possible confirmation of life in the universe beyond Earth is extraordinary. That the life in question – Phosphine – smells like the bad gas of a rat after a night of dumpster diving is extraordinarily 2020. And yet here we are.

      In another year the announcement of life on another planet would have been front page news. But Phosphine isn’t particularly sexy as life goes, and we have enough alien life to deal with right here on Earth already. Honestly I’m happy there are brilliant people like Clara Sousa-Silva and her peer Jane Greaves are out that the very thing that we’ve all been looking at all along has potential living matter dancing in the Venus clouds. My mind simply doesn’t function in such a way that I’d make that connection between the chemical signature of Phosphine as proof of life on Venus. Or rather, life in the clouds of Venus.

      That brilliant women are leading the discovery of life on Venus leads to the rather obvious men are from Mars, women are from Venus analogy, but I dare not go further than that. I’ll simply concede that these women are far ahead of me in the brain matter department and doing mind-blowing work. I spend my time with words and images and making connections between people, not immersed in science. Shame on me, really, for this is really fascinating.

      And yes, I’ll admit it: Venus and I have had a long relationship. It’s not exclusive, mind you, but we get together often on long evening walks or quiet moments of stargazing. I admit I even take the binoculars out sometimes to get a closer look. But I knew the relationship was best kept long-distance. Venus has a toxic personality, after all. Best to look but not touch. And now to find out that she has bad breath too. It’s all too much, really. To gaze in wonder at this heavenly object for years only to find out she’s not at all what you expected her to be. But expectations are funny things, and we spend far too much time elevating objects of our affection to higher levels than they ought to occupy. That’s a lesson we can bring right back to Earth straight from the clouds of Venus.

    • Celestial Dance

      This morning Venus was dancing with the crescent moon, while Juniper looked on with envy.  The air is brutally cold this morning, but getting outside before the sunrise has its benefits.  Watching this tango was one of them.  Sadly I couldn’t get a decent picture of conjunction of these three, but I’m glad to have shared the moment with them.

      My reason for being outside in the first place on this cold morning was to let Bodhi get outside for a little relief.  The days of long power walks are over for him, and it seems I’m not inclined to do many myself without his company.  So seeing celestial dances like this aren’t as common as they once were for me.  I clearly need to change my routine and get back outside.