Rememberance XI

Forty years ago today I sat before a Zenith black and white television set, with red magic marker and glossy white paper, drawing the images being sent live from the Apollo 11 moon landing.


            


Those sketches were for my godmother, April Oursler Armstrong (related to Neil, perhaps, only in my five-year-old mind).

April was the "Dear Abby" for the Tertiary Franciscans, with a long running advice column in the Order's magazine, The Franciscan Herald. An issue of The Saturday Evening Post, one with Ayn Rand on the cover, had run April's article, "Don't Want 'Well-Adjusted' Children".

It was her wedding anniversary. Her husband, my godfather, had just run for mayor against the father of whose estate now funds Vast Sky.

What an impact those images of the earth from space have had on us since! So much of our emergent values revolve around our being able to view the planet whole. Today we scale like none before us. I take for granted that I zoom-in to that scene on a living room floor all those years ago, and back out to beyond the earth's horizons, today. From that first nuclear family, to the planetary one.

With the rise of the global commons and even initiatives such as this site, we see all around us the evidence of the influence of those whole earth views, and all the meaning found therein.