Saturday, July 16, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Landon pointed at the moon and exclaimed “Luna! Luna!”
I looked up to notice the moon watching us from the evening sky. Like most people, I tend to forget it exists except for certain phases that make the news, such as a supermoon, the cosmic combo that took place Wednesday.
My 3-year-old grandson is too young to take any phase of the moon for granted. He stared at it with the awe of, well, a young child. The joy of being in the presence of a toddler is viewing the world with a refocused wonderment for everything in sight.
As I held Landon in my arm, I flashed back to when I was a young boy, staring up at the moon with a similar sense of astonishment on one historic evening. The date was July 20, 1969, when mankind took one small step and one giant leap.
I was 7 years old, standing on the front porch of my family’s home in Gary, Ind., looking up and squinting into the night sky. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, until I had to go to bed that night. Someday I’ll share this story with Landon, who calls the moon “Luna” because he’s also learning to speak Spanish.
As he and I stared together at the moon, it stared back at us, just as it has at Earth for roughly 4.5 billion years. I wondered about all the times the moon has stared back at people during our different phases of life. For instance, when we were full of love, or feeling the gravitational pull of passion, or orbiting the wrong person for so long we lost track of our own trajectory.
The moon has always been there, quietly watching us since our first gaze into the sky. The older most of us get, the rarer it seems we return the moon’s gaze despite the countless opportunities we’re given. Or, for that matter, to gaze at anything in space. Our childhood wonderment eventually gets eclipsed by our earthbound concerns.
On Monday, we were again reminded that deep space exists with the first revealed peek through the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA released one of the telescope’s first images, a glimpse into the birth of our universe — and our world.
“This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground,” a NASA press release states. “It is the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken.”
Imagine that. An image capturing a massive group of galaxy clusters serving as a magnifying glass into our earliest beginnings.
On Tuesday, the rest of the high-resolution color images made their debut on NASA’s website, nasa.gov. One of those images captures a snapshot of the Carina Nebula, described as a “stellar nursery” where stars are born, located 7,600 light-years away. It’s impossible for a Luddite like me to comprehend such a distance. Or such a concept. I still struggle to understand how we, as a species, built something that can land on the moon.
This latest news about space should force us to reconsider the spaciousness of our existence. It should prompt us to explore the macro aspect of life more than the micro aspect of our lives. This can be a difficult mind-jettison in a world of economic inflation, partisan politics, mass shootings and tedious responsibilities.
“The world is about to be new again,” said Eric Smith, one of NASA’s chief scientists.
This won’t be true for most earthlings. We will remain grounded in our fears, our anger, and our daily struggle for existence, just as our species has done for eons. What may change, for some of us anyway, is how we perceive our world, hopefully with a “fresh and powerful set of eyes” to reexamine our universe, as Smith said.
More importantly, I say, to reexamine our priorities.
We should use this latest cosmic news to look beyond our mortal shortcomings. To look above our ignorance or arrogance. To transcend our predictable constellations of habits and routines, if only for a few fleeting moments.
This is our chance to again look into the sky with the wonderment of a toddler. Yet, essentially, with the same breadth of knowledge as a toddler about concepts too deep for many of us to fully understand.
Fortunately, our old friend the moon isn’t as mysterious or as confounding.
It’s there for us every night, beaming with all the brightness of a child whether we’re able to view it or not. It stares down at us throughout its different phases as we evolve through our own phases, from womb to tomb. Somewhere in the ether exists a netherworld between heaven and hell, but also between boredom and wonderment.
It’s up to us to take one giant leap of appreciation.
I can thank my grandson for reminding me of this new realization. For one moonstruck moment, all I had to do was look up. How super is that?
Jerry Davich is a columnist for The Times of Munster, Ind.
