NPR - "I Believe"

NEW:  Price of Gasoline (Regular Unleaded 87 Octane)  $2.44.9 (Bethesda, MD)

NEW:  Star Gazing   Vanishing Venus Venus continues to shine forth in the southwest in the early evening this week. It's been the "evening star" for months, shining as the brightest object in the night sky except the Moon. But its reign is just about over. Over the next couple of weeks, Venus will drop a little lower in the sky each evening. It'll disappear in the Sun's glare in early January. The planet will cross between Earth and the Sun in the middle of the month, then return to view as the "morning star" a few days later.

Even though this switch from evening to morning sky happens regularly, in centuries past many cultures thought of "evening-star" and "morning-star" Venus as separate objects. They gave them different names, and often associated them with different gods.

One culture that understood that the bright "star" they saw in the morning or evening sky was actually a single object was the Maya of Mexico and Central America.

Their knowledge of the heavens was acquired through careful observations. Mayan priests plotted Venus's motions over the course of decades and even centuries. There's evidence that they built special skywatching stations to help them track the planet's path along the horizon. Using these observations, the Maya could predict Venus's position in the sky far into the future.

Our future holds Venus in view low in the southwest in early evening for a couple of more weeks, then moving into the morning sky in late January. . www.stardate.org/nightsky.

I listened to this on my drive back to DC from Bristol this weekend.  It touched me as I can relate to it as I grew up on a farm and still own that land.  This link can be found at www.npr.org.

I believe we are not alone.

Even if I am on the other side of the world from the farmhouse I live in, I still dream of the ancient vines out the window, and the shed out back that my grandfather's father built in 1870 with eucalyptus trunks. As long as I can recreate these images, I never quite leave home.

I don't think farming in the same place for six generations is a dead weight that keeps you shackled, doing the identical thing year in and year out. Instead, it is a rare link to others before me, who pruned the same vines and painted the same barn that I have. If those in this house survived the Panic of 1893 or the Great Depression, or bathed with cold water and used an outhouse, then surely I know I can weather high gas prices.

I believe that all of us need some grounding in our modern world of constant moving, buying, selling, meeting and leaving. Some find constancy in religion. Others lean on friends or community for permanence. But we need some daily signposts that we are not novel, not better, not worse from those who came before us.

For me, this house, this farm, these ancient vines are those roots. Although I came into this world alone and will leave alone, I am not alone.

There are ghosts of dozens of conversations in the hallways, stories I remember about buying new plows that now rust in the barnyard and ruined crops from the same vines that we are now harvesting.

I believe all of us are natural links in a long chain of being, and that I need to know what time of day it is, what season is coming, whether the wind is blowing north or from the east, and if the moon is still full tomorrow night, just as the farmers who came before me did.

The physical world around us constantly changes, but human nature does not. We must struggle in our brief existence to find some transcendent meaning during reoccurring heartbreak and disappointment and so find solace in the knowledge that our ancestors have all gone through this before.

You may find all that all too intrusive, living with the past as present. I find it exhilarating. I believe there is an old answer for every new problem, that wise whispers of the past are with us to assure us that if we just listen and remember, we are not alone; we have been here before.