July 26, 2021

2021.07.26
At the risk of sounding a little too much like a Bezos-enthusiast:
I had another feeling, that the earth is like a vibrant living thing. The vessels we've clearly seen on it looked like the blood and veins of human beings. I said to myself: this is the place we live, it's really magical.
Yang Liu (astronaut in Chinese Space Program)
During a space flight, the psyche of each astronaut is re-shaped; having seen the sun, the stars and our planet, you become more full of life, softer. You begin to look at all living things with greater trepidation and you begin to be more kind and patient with the people around you.
Cosmonaut Boris Volynov
From the Barking Up The Wrong Tree blog, stressing the importance of "Awe".

I think I have a strong but lowkey sense of that; my unshakeable certainty that, almost by definition, an absolute or at least most accurate sense of Truth has to exist, which is matched by an equal sense of the impossibility of certainty of knowing what it is. This sense of over-archingness and mystery has its roots in Christian traditions, but the big divergence is in faith - for me the trope of "A Certain Faith" is almost an oxymoron. (And usually comes down to questioning the hubris of how your group has got the special revelation or hard-won external justification that has for some reason been denied others, who probably feel the same about their own, possibly incompatible beliefs.)