mean distance from the sun.

Mercury = 36 million miles

Venus = 67 million miles

Earth = 93 million miles

Mars = 142 million miles

Jupiter = 483 million miles

Saturn = 887 million miles

Uranus = 1,783 million miles (1.8 billion miles)

Neptune = 2,794 million miles (2.8 billion miles)

And, as Carl Sagan writes ~

The sun is but one lonely star in a self-gravitating assemblage of suns called the Milky Way Galaxy.

And we are thirty thousand light years from the center. Staring up at the Milky Way last Saturday from high up and deep within the North Cascades, wrapped in down and as comfortable and at peace as I can imagine being as the light of the day gave way to the dark of night, these distances were on my mind and the reminder of how alone each of these planets, all of the stars, and I guess by correlation all of us – really are. Separated by hundreds, thousands, billions of light years. There were a couple other groups up there, but inside my sleeping bag staring up into space I didn't notice. I was alone.

To gaze up at the stars is incredible in the fact the sense is always there that nothing is as it appears and everything is always changing. The nearest spiral galaxy like our own is M31 in the constellation Andromeda, and is 2 million light-years away. So of course that means we're seeing it as it was 2 million years ago. What does it look like now?  What about the quasars 5 billion light years away?

These distances are mesmerizing. Infinite. Nothing stays the same.

new horizons.

Key of F# minor (although the key is the G# diminished chord). All of a sudden and out of nowhere now just right there in front of me. No idea where this stuff comes from. But it's there now totally in my head and no way I can just fall asleep even though I'm dead tired from way too little sleep all week so far cos it's exploding.

I fly away scattered and absorbed

violet and blue atmospheres and hues

As Carl Sagan writes ~

"When we look up on a cloudless day and admire the blue sky, we are witnessing the preferential scattering of the short waves in sunlight. This is called Raleigh scattering ....

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works – that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red?"

reading to write.

My partial stack of required reading to begin writing. I've actually read all of them except for the bottom two, which I've been reading in sections here and there. And I'm now regretting having just sent my sister Kathy my only underlined copy of Into The Wild.

Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera

A River Runs Through It Norman Maclean

One of my journals that has some old lyrics in it, including Collide

Pale Blue Dot Carl Sagan

Cosmos Carl Sagan

Murmurs of Earth Carl Sagan

collide.

I must lie .... I must lie among the covers

under the stars I try to hide

but like protons and electrons we must collide

change.

For starters, a new blog. Next, a new name. Or at least a new spelling of an old name. Adding an 'h' cos I can. As often as I get mistaken for being British I feel it's not too far of a stretch. And other things which I'll get to in time, but that can be summed up by this quote from Ansel Adams ~

The world moves in strange and perplexing tracks. I feel a deep growing urge for some sort of change – to simplify and enrich my life and work. I feel I have a lot to do and my energies will be taxed to the utmost to do it.

~ in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz from Yosemite National Park dated July 29, 1937 (twelve years after purchasing a Mason & Hamlin grand piano with "religious awe and reverence")

Over time, I plan on going back to my old blog and finding the worthwhile posts and adding them here so eventually I'll just have one blog of all my thoughts and musings. But this is the new beginning.