peace on earth

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My uncle Louis sends me the most amazing links in his emails.   Aside from politics and nationalism, ecology and money spent, all of which have their place, I hope you can see the enormity of this gift that NASA's "poet astronaut"  Colonel Douglas H. Wheelock has made available to his fellow earthlings as he says:
"Every moment I get to look out the window at our beautiful planet,  my soul just sings!!... 'I see skies of blue…and clouds of white…the bright blessed day…'" (6-29-10)

Here is  one .  And here's  another.


And here are the lyrics to a song performed by the English comedy troupe,  Monty Python,  which one of this link's viewers remembered..

                                              Galaxy Song

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.

                                        *

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go ’round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

                                         *

                                       

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.

Oh yes,  a little irony comes in handy when one is feeling small and insignificant.

But,  for the record,  I'd like to suggest that we not only pray  (which has scientific proof of its benefits),   but aspire to be the spiritual intelligence that over-rides even the greatest intellectual intelligence as we proceed in our humble,  yet noble,  lives.

p  e  a  c  e     o  n     e  a  r  t  h