Vacation Trip

Re-entry August 23 2010


We travel up, away, into new orbits, new excitement.

Seeing endless promise, new perspectives --

Wonderfully exciting, satisfying,

Like astronauts, we walk in space,

Freed from gravity of duty, schedules, daily chores.

But re-entry looms.

We draw close, approaching splash down,

Then, relinquishing adventure’s quest,

Take back our daily cares,

Re-inhabiting our old small tasks and spaces,

We are, however, changed, enlarged,

Forever liberated just a little ,

Having seen and felt infinity.



Reflection:

Summer is a time to travel, to expand, to rest and feel free. On vacation trips, we try on different realms of life as if traveling to outer galaxies. Nancy and I just returned from a trip to visit family, and discovered an opportunity, in Huntsville, AL, to see a variety of actual space shuttles and to learn about the astronauts’ experiences. The films taken from the Hubble and the spacecraft that traveled to service it were awe-inspiring – a true glimpse of an apparently infinite universe. What a different scale from our normal earthbound perspective! And yet, like the astronauts, though experiencing a few days without the weight of daily schedules and concerns, we soon found ourselves touching down back at home, needing to face again the too-long to-do lists that we’d abandoned for a few days. It’s good to get a reminder occasionally that weightlessness exists, and to learn again to just be, without constantly having to perform and produce.