It’s a paradox: How everything we do, especially in this fraught age, holds incredible significance…while at the very same time being completely insignificant in the big big picture?

I’ve been thinking about the “pale blue dot” that is our home. And how we are hurtling through space. And how we are each a pixel in the picture. Tiny, tiny—but crucial.

Self-portrait: Planet Earth, as seen from Voyager 1, 1990. Public domain photo from NASA.

As Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote of that pale blue dot:

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

View from our porch

Gratitude: Summer, I love you. The ease of you. The barefootedness. The sun and warm. Everything fruiting and seeding all over the place, practically spilling over abundance.

Tip of the Day: If you have the means, give a little some of that abundance away. Whether garden produce or a smile (make it big enough to show with the eyes since the mask will hide it!) or a monetary contribution, giving is good for the soul. (Here’s a GoFundMe option: My friend Lydia, living on the other side of that blue dot just now as she went home to her native South Africa just in time for COVID-19 lockdown, is raising money to help people whose homes were destroyed in a windstorm in a town called Ladismith.

Resource of the Day: I wrote a piece about finding balance in uncertain times for Kit Magazine. Check it out if that is of interest!