Scientistswishingwell - Popsicles In Summer

Ok so many people are saying things like “this will make room for better science” and like, I agree, but

There’s something really essential and human about having a place in space where we go just to see what happens

There’s something really wonderful about people going up there and getting messages from earth and sending funny videos and over time we’ve seen so many people go up and come down

And it’s one thing to send people up on a little road trip but it’s quite another to say, this will be your home, and this will be your crew, they are from all different places, and the one thing you all have in common is that you looked up and said “someday that will be me” and then you all looked down and said “that is us, and I love it, and we are all nothing and we are all essential”

So yeah the world will get better science and we’ll have a spectacular crash to watch but I hope more than anything that we keep something of the gentle wonderment that came from just, having a place in space where we could all be. Just to watch the stars and grow plants in zero g and look down at the vastness and smallness of earth and love it.

I feel like nobody on Tumblr knows that the international space station is being discontinued.

Did you know that? In less than a decade it will be gone

CNN Link from above screenshot

More detailed article by Space.com

Emotions are so incredibly visceral

Earlier this week I was so sad and anxious I almost threw up

Now I’m so content I feel as though I could climb a mountain or explore my city or run a mile

The sun is warm and the air is cool and I could fall asleep here on this park bench if I didn’t worry I’d miss something lovely

I love you (it, them, us, everything) so much

I guess I’ve learned that though I may not always be happy, I’ve always loved being alive. I would miss all of this so much. And that shakes me to my core some days. Other days I’m just so lucky to be here. Some days I wonder what I would really miss, but imagining the void left behind is too much to bear.

There’s something about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice that’s held my soul in a vise gripe since I saw Hadestown

And I think it’s the fact that the story is of course, devastating, but it doesn’t mean anything

Not to say that it’s meaningless, but that so many other stories in mythology are used to explain natural phenomena or take down histories or tell cautionary tales about what happens when you mess with the gods

No, in this case, it’s just a tale of two people who loved each other, and would go to the ends of the earth to save one another. It wasn’t about destiny or being forced down some awful path or making terrible mistakes and being filled with regret. At its core, this is just a story about love, in it’s most human vulnerability and strength.

I mean, think about someone you love. Doesn’t even have to be a romantic partner. I know, in my absolute core, that I would go to the ends of the earth and back and around again for my partner. I’d die for my sister. I’d live for my dog.

Sure, Orpheus walks the lonely road to hell and nearly makes it back. And maybe, sometime in history, there was a man named Orpheus who loved his wife and when she was taken from him, he followed, in one way or another, never to return. It’s not vengeance. It’s not destiny. In a way, it’s not even valor or chivalry or bravery. It’s just love. At its core, it’s just love. And maybe the people left behind honored that by telling their story.

So it is a sad song, an old tale. And we sing it again and again, because we hope that if someday we have to follow our lives into hell with no hope of returning, there will be some vestige of our love left behind.

So if I am remembered for anything, thousands of years after I have gone, let it be for my love.

I was here, and I loved, and I left with love, and I didn’t get to come back, so sing my song, in my absence, with love.

So a while ago I was working at the little town bookstore (as you do, more stories about that sure to come) and I got so invested in a particular author (Alix E. Harrow) that I went and stalked her Instagram for a good long time while the store was quiet. And I found that she had recommended a book that wasn’t out yet, but was going to be out in a few days. It was Becky Chamber’s Psalm for the Wild Built.

And oh, oh boy, did that book change me. There are some people out there that you will meet who reach right into your body with their words and physically alter how your brain works. I was going through a rough time when I read this book, and I wept on the back porch of my parent’s home in the dappled shade of sugar maples and it was the first time I’d cried tears of happiness and relief in… a long, long time.

I recommend that book to everyone I met. It is my comfort book. It is a warm hug from someone you miss. It is a kind word from a stranger. It is a cup of tea on a rainy day and a glass of lemonade on a hot one. You ever want to feel seen, instead of observed? Comforted and encouraged instead of force-fed horrors? Reassured that people are good, and goodness finds a way, and small comforts are not luxuries to be ashamed of but essentials to be shared with anyone willing to sit by your table? Go read this book. It took me less than two hours to read.

It is not magical, it does not force a strange world upon you. It simply looks at you softy, offers you a drink and some food, which it has made itself but is happy to share, and tells you that it sees you, that you are real, and you are being cared for.

The second book came out a year later and I read it as soon as I could get my hands on it. It was equally comforting, and it challenged me to think about what I was giving to myself, and question whether enough of that was kindness. It challenged me to think about my faith, both in something greater than myself and something that was shared equally among everyone I will ever know. And once again, this time sitting in the dimly-lit kitchen of my first apartment, I wept tears of relief and joy. It was okay to feel how I was feeling. My grief had been seen, validated, and held in someone’s hands like glass until I could place it on the shelf of my experiences: never gone, but finally in its place.

This book of small comforts and gentle joys and big questions inside of small people made me feel safe. My greatest struggles have been with anxiety, with never feeling safe, and this book, for days at a time, made me feel safe in my own mind and body. Becky Chambers managed, in about 150 pages, to write a story that changed how my brain worked.

I’m pretty sure these are the best books I’ve ever read. And they came to me exactly when I needed them. I’m looking forward to what comes next.

What looks flat in a car is actually the entire Himalayan mountain range on a bike