The Stellar Survey - perspective edition

On trips to space and gaps in time and falling in love with the world

• What would it be like if gravity had never existed? I know—you, me, everyone—we tie ourselves up in knots about this question all of the time. | Well—if there was no gravity, our universe might have looked like this.

• Good ol’ JWST got a closer look at that asteroid we were all worried about a few months ago—and it looks like all will be okay! No destruction for Earth in 2032! | Once again, we have no get-out-of-jail-free card. Time to put our minds and our hearts back to where they should be—on saving the planet, and ourselves.

• What’s the difference between young and old exoplanets? | Read about how planetary scientists study and understand planetary evolution.

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The world is chaos and utter foolishness and every time I pull the news up on my phone it seems something else equally, stupefyingly mind-boggling has happened yet again. I know you know the feeling. Where are we, in this time where the rich just keep on getting richer and the bad guys keep on being creeps? Where entire cities and civilizations are being levelled and people talk of “relocation” like someone’s being moved due to an inconvenience and not being ethnically cleansed? What have we become? Who are we, as human beings?

It all hurts. Everything feels so tender and raw, everywhere I look.

And also, my cherry tree is blooming.

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• Look at this image of a “pure white” Antarctica, taken by the astronauts on the recent Fram2 expedition. | They’re the first to orbit the Earth on a north-south orbit pattern.

• Check out this ESA documentary about the space junk circling our planet. | Sobering? Yes. But if my cherry tree has taught me anything, it’s that beauty can come even after what feels like an unending winter.

• Sort-of space related, but also sort-of not: the benefits of catching the sunrise and sunset. | I wonder if the crew on the ISS gets 16 times this benefit, compounded by the 16 sunrises and sunsets they see every day?

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Life is wonderful, right now. And also it is quiet, and hard, and filled with things that mushroom anxiety in my chest even around all of the beauty. I’ve been speaking at book festivals—including the tenth anniversary FOLD just last weekend!—and taking little trips up to northern Ontario to speak to writers and people who ask me gloriously insightful questions about my work, about my writing life, about me.

And also I’ve been caregiving, and trying to keep the bottom from falling out from a number of things, and thinking long and hard all over again about what it means to be a literary citizen—at all times, but especially times like these. What does it mean to write and support a world that’s always in the act of becoming something else? How do the stories we tell—even the seemingly innocuous, escapist stories, or maybe especially those—help to bring us forward to this change? How do we survive, as writers, in a capitalist world that seems hell bent on paying us less and less, with apparently the ultimate goal of replacing us with algorithms and AI?

How do we survive, as human beings, when the reality of how terrible we are to one another is broadcast on our screens every minute of the day?

Did I make the wrong decision, leaving the FOLD last year? Or is this just another inevitable aftershock from that moment of life upheaval? (I think it’s the latter, but aftershocks still have their own power. Weathering these is its own kind of journey, as anyone who’s dealt with them knows.)

Also blooming: my tulips. (The ones, that is, that haven’t had their heads eaten by squirrels.)

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• Researchers have discovered a new colour—one that’s impossible to see without lasering your retinas. | Only five people on the planet have been able to see it. (It is not, spoiler alert, the colour of my squirrel-eaten tulips.)

• Earlier in April, Don Pettit—NASA’s oldest astronaut—celebrated turning 70 by spashing back down to Earth after some time in orbit. | Talk about an out-of-this-world birthday!

• Newly-analyzed samples from the asteroid Bennu show a rich, complex make-up of chemicals and amino acids that could potentially have seeded life on Earth. | From death and destruction, also life. Isn’t that always how it goes?

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It is hard not to look at the news and feel guilty, sometimes. Life is hard in its own way here in my corner of the world and yet it—and I—has and have also been so very lucky. I have so much, and I know this.

All that is beautiful and all that is terrible and hard, existing hand-in-hand. So what can we do but march forward, holding tight to both of these things? In my reading and listening to the dharma, this is the thread that keeps coming up: it is the dirt that makes the beauty possible. No mud, no lotus.

Without the destructive collisions of all those meteors billions of years ago, we wouldn’t have our planet in all of its impossible splendour now. And while it’s true that we’re hardly in need of the suffering we humans inflict on ourselves and others, I am trying to rest in the knowledge that even when we’re at our worst, beauty still manages to show up. Everywhere.

The green that forces its way to the sky from the smallest of cracks in the concrete.

Look at how terrible we are, yes. But also: look at how we rise to meet that, every day. In ways both large and small.

Like a cherry tree that holds within itself the forever-promise of blooming.

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• Hours before a solar eclipse, spruce trees talk to each other—via electrical signals—about the impending change. | In their research, scientists discovered that older trees responded to the coming eclipse with stronger signals first, indicating that they perhaps are accessing memories of previous phenomenon, and passing them along to younger trees.

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And so, onward we go, holding tight to the wisdom of all the stars and trees.