Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot

The Yellowjackets Edition

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot has been a touchstone of life for me for decades. There hasn't EVER been a time when I've listened to this great man say these universal words that I haven't wept or felt my skin thrill with numinous chills. I am forever grateful to Carl for this and wish I could have told him in person.

My dear friend and Maynard Road Brother Chris Braymen took me on an excursion right before the election (Ah... life BEFORE November 5th, 2024 ...but I digress...) and we visited Carl's grave.

Expand this photo and look at the marvelous tokens of thankfulness, whimsy, reverent Jewish tradition and, well...numinousity placed lovingly around around this marker of Carl's Earthly remains. WOW,

My dear friend Chris Braymen dealing with the intensity of the sunset!

 Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, New York, a place of incredible beauty, and–I am using a word I learned from reading Carl's works everywhere here a–numinous–bit of hallowed ground indeed.

The words come from the great man in the form of a book. You can learn more about that work here: Pale Blue Dot

And here are those precious words:

Look again at that 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.

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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Copyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan, Copyright © 2006 by Democritus Properties, LLC.

Add to all of this yet another profoundly moving and inspirational work of art in my life, that of Russell Ferrante and Jimmy Haslip's composition "Greenhouse" adorned by one of the most beautiful things that I have EVER heard for string orchestra by the great Vincent Mendoza and you have a collective feast for the soul indeed.

I've been meaning to edit these two things together FOREVER but didn't have the right occasion or inclination... until NOW.

With what was begun on 5 November, 2024 and what I fear may be happening currently, and worst of all...what may be imminent... we need Carl's words NOW more than ever. And when you add the music of the Yellowjackets (circa 1991, the beginning of what I call "The Bob Mintzer Era" Bob Mintzer: tenor sax, soprano sax, bass clarinet, Russell Ferrante: keyboards, Jimmy Haslip: bass, and Will Kennedy: drums and percussion) the message becomes even more profound and visceral.

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Please spread this far and wide.

The entire planet–that pale blue dot–needs to hear this.

Carl Sagan 1934-1996