Dear Ornament Reader,

Words fail us, and we falter in our thoughts, as we look ahead to 2006, but they have not failed other great contemplators. The following is our New Year greeting for this year and ever more, written by the late Dr. Carl Sagan, astronomer and a dedicated, tenacious lover of life.

"We succeeded in taking [a] picture [from deep space] and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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.

"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity-in all this vastness-there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind there perhaps is no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

As humans and not diviners, we are fated to live with ambiguity in the cosmic dark, with never knowing for certain what are the true meanings of our lives, of the events and circumstances surrounding and enveloping us all. It takes patience and courage to live within such an unsettled state, to respect the process, and not force end results, but to let life evolve, as we know it has been unfolding, in its subtly nuanced way for vast amounts of millennia. There is so much more to be accomplished and nurtured, given our fallible nature; yet the millennia ahead are sure to positively advance us in ways we cannot appropriately appreciate in the temporality of the here and now. To reach for the stars has always seemed a metaphor for reaching out and touching our hearts to preserve and cherish what is noble about our sentience. For all our darkness and cruelty, humanity could not have developed art, music, literature, science, philosophy or concepts of peace and justice, kindness and compassion if there had not been the possibility of improving upon ourselves, as we infinitely suspend in the gracious beneficence of a sunbeam. So visualize that blue globe in your hands. That's us. Think of it kindly. Think of it compassionately. Think of it responsibly. Take a next good step. Help us evolve a little bit more. It is all up to us.

 

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