We were back home, in the kitchen, listening to National Public Radio. An Astrophysist was speaking about the James Webb Space Telescope and it's mission:
Seeking Light from the First Galaxies in the Universe
"Webb will directly observe a part of space and time never seen before. Webb will gaze into the epoch when the very first stars and galaxies formed, over 13.5 billion years ago. Ultraviolet and visible light emitted by the very first luminous objects has been stretched or “redshifted” by the universe’s continual expansion and arrives today as infrared light. Webb is designed to “see” this infrared light with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity."
We were kind of stunned into silence. James Webb is flying into the Past? What?! Everything Webb sees is the Past. There was talk of distant, baby galaxies, and Black Holes, invisble, massive and mysterious. And, well, fuck: Time. Lots of Time in Space. The farther Webb travels the deeper it goes into an earlier Universe. Bizzare. We were scracthing our heads. Trying to get our heads around these very weird, other-worldly facts. So strange. Hard to digest. Extraordinary and extra-human.
Wonder. Stunned into Wonder. We were also inspired. Listening to the Astrophysist was so captivating, she was so excited about explaining this amazing mission. Very, super-impressive.
After that late lunch my partner went outside to work on her lovely garden, and I put on a pair of closed-back headphones and sank into stirring, fabulous r&r music from the Rolling Stones. How to process the Universe? Who knows? We turned to Flowers & Music.
Later in the evening, just before we headed off to bed, my partner turned to me with tears in her eyes. She floated this heartfelt question to me: "Why aren't we doing better?" I knew the "we" she was asking about was Humanity. All of Humanity.
The Universe is so grand, so strange, so mysterious, so other-worldly-magnificent. How it is possible that we Human Beings are so smart, so enterprising & clever, we can actually build and launch a telescope deep into the Universe to explore and send back images to us on Earth? Our pretty little home a swirling, twirling little Blue Planet? Pretty damn head-explodingly-clever.
And, simultaneously, what the fuck is so deeply wrong with Human Beings? Why are we such a rollicking, sadly-tragic/comic shit-show (you know war, death, evil intent, willful stupidty, cruelty, bad blood, bad action, greed, & soul-killing selfishness)?
How to answer?
I mean, it's a gnarly, knotty question for sure, one that begs for an answer. But we both knew, there really wasn't one. A big, fat dark cloud of unknowing hung over us. "Why?" I fumbled around a bit in my head. I flashed on Cheech & Chong; a duo of comical, stoned-out, heady-navel-gazing. Finally, I ventured my own paltry, inadequate, poorly-constructed and verbalized response: "I mean... um... you know... like... well... fuck... um... who knows?"
