Between a Rock and a Hot Place

I think a lot about the marvels and mysteries of life. That is a prerogative that longevity grants us in retirement. And in those ponderings I have become acutely aware that ours is a precarious existence, a balancing act if you will, forces perpetually pulling us in opposite directions. Activity and rest, friendship and estrangement, truthfulness and deception, loyalty and integrity—we walk a daily tightrope on which our character either stands or falls. Remarkably, most of us learn to do this quite well, managing those oppositional forces with a surprising amount of skill. It becomes so much a part of our daily experience that we rarely even notice the exertions we commit to just making it through each day. In fact, aside from the occasional crisis we may have to handle, things sail along without our noticing how 0ften we are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Perhaps that is as it should be.  For, in reality, our entire life plays out on a planetary orb whose rotations around an invisible axis, and whose revolutions around a ball of yellow light, are essentially imperceptible to us. While the earth beneath our feet appears stable and fixed, it is actually gyrating like a top going hundreds of miles per hour.  All the while it whisks us around our home star at a 66,000 mph clip. If that isn’t enough to make your head spin, our sun takes its planetary family, us included, spiraling around the Milky Way at a mere 483,000 mph. Yet from our ant-like vantage point on a planet big enough to support billions like us, all is still and constant. The slow and regular pattern of sunrises and sunsets, solar migrations from solstice to solstice that chart the seasons, move at a pace we’ve come to expect and accept as normal. Every so often, however, something unusual catches our eye, reminding us that we are, in fact, passengers on a planet whose very existence depends on its location, somewhere in space, between a rock and a HOT place.

A few nights from now, in the wee hours of the morning of November 19 to be exact, those of us living in North America will have a chance to witness a vivid sign of this cosmic balancing act.  The sky will shed light—or in this case, shadow—on the longest lunar eclipse of the 21st Century—so far. In just over six hours the moon will be fully or partially obscured, by us. Should the clouds permit, we may be able to catch all of it, the earth blocking the sun’s rays enough to turn the moon’s cheesy smile into a dusky blush. I’m sure most of us have seen this heavenly phenomenon many times before. Unlike those in which our lunar companion does the obstructing, this one will require no shielding of the eyes to behold its progression. But it will challenge us in holding our attention so late at night during such a slow and uneventful astronomical cover up.

The prospect of witnessing another of these planetary passages has gotten me thinking about the relationship we have with our two most important extra-terrestrial companions. In doing so I join a long list of mystics, poets and scientists who have been transfixed watching them faithfully chart their course across the skies. Our ancestral cosmologists viewed them as divinities that not only brought us warmth and light, but served as our most dependable time pieces. Perhaps that is why the writer of Genesis 1 placed their creation, not at the beginning when light first appeared, but in Day 4 when God commanded them to rule the day and the night so that our times and seasons would be well regulated.  

Caught as we are in this gravitational dance between a rock and a hot place, I am profoundly moved by how much each of these celestial partners means to us, affecting our lives on a daily basis. Their invisible pull determines so much we take for granted: gravity, the oceans’ tides, and even our changing climate, to name the three we most easily recognize.  And we continue to follow the wisdom of our predecessors in marking time in accordance with their perceived migrations overhead:  our 365+ day solar year, and our monthly pattern of four, seven day weeks (give or take a few), which aligns perfectly with the moon’s 28 day cycle. Interestingly we seem to lean more on the exactitude of the lunar phases that wax and wane without deviation, than we do on a sun we have to catch up every four years to keep it in synch with our planetary movements. But who really cares about such things today when we can look to our phones and watches, and not to the heavens, to tell us both who we are and when we are.

Such ponderings inevitably make me wonder whether living on a planet, so caught between this particular lunar rock and this one-in-a-gazillion solar hot places, is accidentally fortuitous or providentially favored. I must confess it was easier to accept the latter explanation when earth was the center of the universe and the sky a planetarium roof above our heads. But the realization that we are but a speck of carbon in a cosmic sea of rocks and hot places whose dimensions are yet to be determined gives me pause. Yet our location in the sun’s life-supporting “goldilocks” zone, the ideal inclination of our axis that drives our seasons, and the size and distance of our moon that so affects our oceans, our rotational stability, and even our climate—seems to me so incredible, so lucky, and even so miraculous. Perhaps other minds in far off galaxies with a planet like our own wonder the same thing. But since this is the only place we know, we’ll take it for what it is—an ideal spot to experience life and puzzle over so many things that are just a bit beyond our full understanding. Perhaps that is where we may ultimately discover our truest of balance points—between knowledge and ignorance, curiosity and certainty.

All of these musings have been triggered by the prospect that, in a few days, the light of our silvery moon will be diminished for a few hours. That revelatory event has underscored for me how precise, delicate and all-encompassing is our interrelatedness in this universe in which we have awakened to consciousness. And how precious is that awakening. For it inspires us to regard each breath that fills our lungs, each step that carries us forward, each touch that joins us to another, each taste and smell that delights our appetitive yearnings as something to be savored and treasured.  While we may grouse and fret whenever we feel ourselves pulled or pushed by people, circumstances, or forces that seem beyond our control, yet we are alive, and are blessed whenever we count that realization as a gift. And just as our earth is held in tension between its lunar rock and solar hot place as it ventures across the universe, so we must strike the right balance in temperament, attitude and action that allows us to find our way on our earthbound journey, filled as it, and must be, with rocks and hard (possibly even hot) places.