Space...

Of these generations Space was born. Man’s steps feel not just on the face of our world, but on the dirt and dust of another. And even those steps changed the face of our globe. A new understanding was given to humanity, an old concept for once and for the first time real: Space. Beyond flight, beyond the sky and height and birds’ freedom we found something entirely new: Space, and eternity, “a finale frontier”… New skies, new blankets died with the richest ink that we could touch and feel and wrap around ourselves and our minds around. Man stepped out beyond this world and into a thousand others; and our lives weren’t just flat like an old map, or even constrained as on the surface of a classrooms globe, but they had depth, they’d found a new meaning. We’d stepped beyond height and found space, distance unimaginable. And in doing so, our reach exceeded our grasp. What once only our eye could touch (or could touch only our eye, or only through that our hearts and minds) now our hands had a chance at too. A distant moon became a child brought back to its mother, or a small toy rolling into our hands. Stars became more than just sparkled lights but bright hopes. How sweet and sad our world had become, so poetic as it exploded again and what little domain we had, what small grasp and clear understanding, split and spun out in a million directions to become this universe, ever expanding, and pulling with it in that expansion’s wake our many imaginations.

We found space. Real space. An emptiness, a distance, a separation. And how amazing it was. So much room to play, to fill with imagination, to dream in. And we did. We floated through it and past everything we’d known before.

In our lenses and photographs and souls we saw we were part of something more, much more. We were now part of a system. We’d been totally enfolded in a solar system, a cosmic mind we could travel through, with bodies to visit and touch and kiss.

What grace places two people near enough to fall in love and believe it destiny? How nice and right and perfect that one city might hold two people, so right for one another. Or maybe it’s a school, or a neighborhood. How well made that against all separations, great or small, once lives meet no space exist that is enough. How small is this world that one life can find another to share with, in all the multitudes of faces and feet and inches and miles of sea and earth and hill. What space is this that can be passed through and brought to its nothing point? Is this world so big, when chance or luck or faith alone can work beyond so great an obstacle as space?
So, how great is all that space we’ve found? How long will we be alone? How long until we’re found or find that no emptiness is far enough when two celestial bodies pumping in rhythmic orbit find one another?

How much space have we found, and what will be that which closes it? Our minds? Our love? Or just our souls, as dreams, returning to another bodies waking life?

I’ve never seen a mission launch. I’ve never seen that power in person that could breach our atmosphere. I’ve never been so close to a power like that, something of gods or angels. I’d love to see our space history, to see those relics, those titans of the outer limit: Sputnik-1, our silver -red- globed Prometheus and an identity of earth’s thirst and thrust. Saturn V, a true rocket ship (a beast, a giant, a cobbled mess of metal and earths core blood) ripped from true imagination and science not-so-fiction, sending more souls than Bradbury’s or Asimov’s or mine, yet unborn, to step a solid step on history. Or the first Space Shuttle, STS-1, that Columbia, whose graceful ascension rivaled that of Mohammad’s or Christ’s or Elijah’s or even Superman’s.

But I’ve seen it on television, and I’ve been cast back to sitting next to my father or mother in 1969 and seen this entire future open up in the glowing brightness of black and white. And wow, what a future that has been opened.

-Caleb Michael, BSD-1, Space Cadet