Tag: The Solar System

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The Solar System, by Gillian

I don’t think we had a Solar System back in the day. We had the sun, the moon, and the stars, with a few planets thrown in. We had galaxies, I think, and we had The Universe, which we believed to be infinite and now we think not, which is OK with me because I never could completely get my head around that concept anyway. Then we were sure it was ever expanding; now we’re not so sure.

Courtesy of The Bible we had The Heavens and, better still, The Firmament; a word, one among many, that my mother loved. She would roll it lovingly around her tongue and tuck it, for later use, in her cheek. The word occurs several times in the King James Version of The Bible, and my mother, not generally given to biblical quotations, would trot out her favorites while gazing skyward in wonder.

“The Heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork,” she would expound, giving The Book of Psalms it’s due.

Or, turning her mind to The Book of Daniel, she would sometimes respond to one of my know-it-all moments with a touch of Biblical sarcasm:

“And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament.”

Fortunately, Mum died before her local church replaced the magical words of the ‘old’ Bible with the soul-less heretical ones of the ‘new’. Had she still been around at that time, I fear she would have exposed her true religious colors and never attended church again.

With our exponentially-increasing knowledge of what we now choose to call the Solar System, the mysteries, the very mysticism, of it, have gone the way of the King James Bible. Oh, yes, knowledge is a wonderful thing, but is does not sit comfortably with mysticism and mystique; nor, come to that, with romance.

Much poetry has been written about the moon and the stars. Frank Sinatra, along with many others, sang romantic ballads extolling their magic.

“Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, baby, kiss me ..”

I fear even old blue eyes himself could not have created a classic love song out of, “Fly me to the Solar System …”

© October 2016

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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The Solar System, by Pat Gourley

“If the Universe doesn’t care about us and if we’re an accident in a remote corner of the Universe, in some sense it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning.” 

Lawrence M. Krauss

The last sentence of this quote, from the controversial physicist and atheist Lawrence Krauss, I think could be viewed as a synonymous description of the actualized queer person. We have had to, through our multitude of unique coming out paths, provide our own meaning. Many of us have started on our path of self-actualization feeling very isolated and alone wondering what is wrong with me. Most of us though eventually realize how precious we really are. We are the golden threads in the tapestry of humanity.

As modern astronomy has proven beyond a doubt our solar system is phenomenally insignificant in our own very insignificant galaxy. Best estimates from data provided by the Hubble Deep Space Telescope is that there are between 100 and 200 billion galaxies in the ever-expanding Universe. Our own galaxy the Milky Way is estimated to contain between 100 billion and 400 billion stars.

If there is a God, or sole initiator of this whole phenomenon, that entity surely must have a bit more on their mind than whom we, inhabiting the third rock from the sun in this miniscule solar system, are fucking. I mean really get a grip and begin to try and comprehend the mindboggling immensity of the Universe. It really implies an extremely exaggerated sense of our own importance to think the initiator of the Big Bang leading to the creation of 200 billion galaxies is preoccupied with our drama. If there were a hell this over the top human hubris alone should get us sent to hades for eternity.

I will admit that perhaps I have a very immature and un-evolved sense of the spiritual. I will concede there may exist an omnipotent source of direction running through the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to date, call it God if you want. Sorry but the comprehension of such an entity at this point in my life is way above my pay grade. It would require an amount of faith-based belief I find really unthinkable and quite frankly a lazy copout. Maybe I could be further along in actualizing the possible reality of this wonder and not having to rely on faith alone, if I spent more cushion-time but I don’t think that is going to happen either.

I actually am quite content thinking we really are the result of a bunch of lucky evolutionary “accidents” that have occurred since living things first appeared on the planet 3.8 billion years ago. When you look at all the countless evolutionary steps and cross roads traversed and we still made the cut it is really something. It is quite precious really.

I was at a very wonderful event recently when two dear male friends decided after 27 years of living together they should get married. Though the words marriage and God were spoken several times during the event it was actually billed on the program as a “Celebration of Love”. I think the institution of marriage was cooked up to control property and women and then their reproductive capacity. I do believe we queers are really bringing our own meaning to it all, to this age old and until recently heterosexual institution.

I was asked to participate by doing a reading or two lasting no more that a couple minutes. It did cross my mind that if there is anything to this God business my stepping into one of his churches might unleash a meteor strike ending the human race right then and there. That did not happen. I was able to read a poem by Walt Whitman and another by Rumi with no detectable dire consequences resulting.

So even if God doesn’t exist and the Universe doesn’t care a twit about us and we are just a happy evolutionary accident in an isolated solar system on the edge of an in significant galaxy it sure is still amazing. As gay people we also get to provide our own sense of meaning and that creative self-realization adds immensely to the human dance on this third rock from the sun.

© October 2016

 About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.