pale.

The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: on the scale of worlds – to say nothing of stars or galaxies – humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

It struck Carl Sagan that if a new image were taken, one from a hundred thousand times farther away, this might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition. And so – finally, after waiting eight years – the time came to turn the cameras on Voyager around after it passed beyond the orbits of Neptune and Uranus back to photograph six of our solar system's planets, including Earth.

Apparently, due to the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth appears to be hovering in a beam of light. What was just a matter of timing perhaps gave the notion of some special significance to this small and distant world, rather than the accident of geometry and physics for which it was. But really, from this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest – a slightly brighter star in a vast, cosmic sea of stars.

Nothing has struck me as more profound. Ever.

He then goes on to write about a time perhaps when we have reached beyond the pale blue dot and colonized other worlds and – looking back through the heavens and the stars – says of us ~

"They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way."

And one sunny afternoon back in February after reading this I stumbled over to the Bechstein, sat down and out of nowhere came up with what I've since thought is what I've been meaning to write all these years just this sunny day happened to use metaphors of a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam in the key of G# minor ~

I awake with pale blue eyes in pale blue skies

I'm surprised

to find my way to stand and strain

to the skies that seem to say I am wise

I am frail but I have tried

to find my way to see through time

and glimpse through veils that hide my Fate

but of stars that fade away fragile and torn

in distant galaxies I am born

four billion miles away I can say

I am alone

all these light years away

alone all these light years away

It is an enormous song. Perhaps more so than any I have ever written or will ever write. The orchestra and the piano lines impossible. The vocal line soaring. And the end–to the crash of cymbals and fortissimo chords the singer strains to reach the crescendo of the lyrics rising over it all. And then four successive downbeats one after another crashing and crashing to the end then silence as the cymbals and piano and orchestra fades out.