The Visitor
I watched the comet last night. Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. It was in the western sky, just after sunset. It will be there for at least another ten days. Click the link and it will give you details on how to see it. Or, if you don’t trust links, look it up, or look up. It’s a fiery light in the western sky, just after sunset, passing by on it’s journey through the cosmos. If you miss it, it will be back in about 80,000 years. Mark it on your calendar.
I wonder how many of the eight billion people on earth even noticed it or notice it? I think we’re probably done with the days when people watched the skies for omens from the gods. Not many prophecies loft to fulfill. Although, there’s probably someone somewhere telling a congregation about how this is a sign of something to come. And that does sound cynical.
But I’ve read about all the wars fought for religious reasons and I can look around and see people still fighting them. There are internecine conflicts within various faiths and wars with outsiders. And the thing that strikes me is how angry they all seem. And I wonder why in the world it matters so much how someone approaches the divine, or why it matters if they don’t. It seems as though we’d all be better off standing on a hill in a cool evening breeze watching a comet fly by and thinking how marvelous it looks and feeling blessed that we’re alive to see it.