Photo by Karen Nyberg, from ISS

Yesterday as I was out delivering boxes of fall vegetables, I heard this on the radio:

Chris Hadfield, former commander of the Space Station, describing space-walking for Terry Gross:  “. . .you’re holding on for dear life to the shuttle or the station with one hand, and you are inexplicably in between what is just a pouring glory of the world roaring by, silently next to you — just the kaleidoscope of it, it takes up your whole mind. It’s like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen just screaming at you on the right side, and when you look left, it’s the whole bottomless black of the universe and it goes in all directions.”

And I, who live inside Earth time, with a carful of Earth’s bounty, with the trees of Earth exploding into choruses of scarlet and crimson and gold all around me–I am still trailing those words like spiderwebs caught in my hair:  “. . .a pouring glory of the world roaring by. . .”  I think I can feel it from here.  Can’t you?

Gratitude List:
1.  The pouring glory of the world roaring by.  Knowing it is doing that out there, but even here, inside Earth time and the ball of atmosphere.
2.  Community child-centered rituals.  Tonight I will take a couple costumed children down to the town to meet their town neighbors in the annual ritual when people open their doors to strangers and offer them sweets.
3.  The ancestors.  This is also the first of three days when many religious and cultural traditions remember those who have gone before us: the ancestors, the saints.
4.  Maple and sweet gum
5.  Quartzite that seeds the hills here and sparkles in the sun.

May we walk in Beauty.