Perhaps the greatest gift brought back to us by the first astronauts to visit the moon was their tender and rapt account of returning to exquisite Planet Earth from a lifeless place. The ecstasy of the homecoming man reaching down to scoop up a handful of soft, warm Pacific water, splashing it onto his face to feel the sensation, reminds us how we who have never left have come to take for granted our home. Precious and fragile, wrapped in the embrace of atmosphere, emanating mists and vapours, flows and currents, warmth and coolness, Earth pulsates with the infinite subtleties of blends and variations, and the miraculous relatedness of every part of the whole in the service of life.
A returning astronaut might behold Planet Earth as a gorgeous blue and green sphere, delicate and ephemeral, rolling through space. We who live here can simply lie on the ground under a tree and look up through its myriad green leaves, ingeniously angled as the original satellite antennae they are to receive the potentising sun’s light from the heavenly blue beyond. Here in the yearning of green for blue, in the beaming of blue at green, our lives are conceived and nourished, for the marriage of blue and green in the leaf feeds the whole world and every being in it.
Blue and green world. Blue and green world. We live in the song of the blue and green world… These journal extracts are a celebration, a thanksgiving for that great and gracious gift.