We'd heard from a friend of a friend that the International Space Station might be visible tonight (during a four minute window), and so without really verifying it, D & I stood outside and stared up for a while, hoping that one of the little lights above us would be closer than a star and farther away than an airplane. But we got nothing for our time except slightly stiff necks and a couple of very cool comet sightings.
"I hope that wasn't the space station," I said about the first streak of light across the sky.
"That," D pointed out, "Was probably the size of a speck of dust."
I heard this today on All Things Considered from Daniel Schorr. And it makes me think that so much of what we worry about is trivial - just little specks of dust zipping across our vision - compared to what else is happening in the world.
Last night (actually early morning, around 3:30 or 4am), I had a dream about trying to save a very young child who had drowned. It's much more complicated than that--my dreams usually are--but after I'd spent a long time analyzing what the whole thing meant, and after I thought I'd figured it all out, I heard the news about Baghdad on the radio on the way in to work. After that, all I could think about was how the boy had had dusty brown skin, and had belonged to a small village full of people who were also dusty brown, and very poor.
The dark side of the dream was the death, of course, and my feeling of being responsible for it. But on the other side, later in the dream, the boy's spirit returned to speak through other small village children. We had buried his body, but we hadn't entirely lost him.
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