The View From Space

In that life-changing moment when I first read on the National Park Service’s website that a raindrop falling into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota would travel the river for 90 days to reach the Gulf of Mexico, I felt a paradigm shift. Since then, seeing the great River in that way has changed my life in ways I could never have imagined.

There came the incredible opportunity to travel for 90 days, keeping pace with an imaginary raindrop called Serendipity, seeing our home and our history from that new perspective and sharing it all with thousands of truly amazing people. Now, there is the adventure of bringing it together into a book that will give others this glorious experience. Every day, I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to participate in this project.

One of the perspectives that I treasure from this participation is seeing ever more clearly the oneness of life. It is one river, one ever-circulating system of water around one planet populated by variations of one Life Force.

We know how travel always seems to have this effect to some degree – it lifts us out of our “me and mine” perspective and into something greater. This morning, my husband passed along a link to a video that includes some of the voices of the few among us who have journeyed much farther – and I was so moved by it, that I want to share it with you.

When astronauts return from space, having seen the earth as one indescribably beautiful and delicate ball in an incomprehensibly vast network of interconnected galaxies, that greater perspective becomes their new framework for viewing life. Most of us won’t be able to duplicate their actual experience, but because they are willing to try to describe what is actually beyond the scope of words, we might be able to sense what cannot be spoken.

The great naturalist John Muir, who also never physically traveled into space, once said it like this:

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”

So, here’s the link. I invite you to give yourself a little gift – it costs only 18 minutes of your day and the perspective it offers is, I think, priceless.

http://vimeo.com/55073825