Planning Our Leave

The Moon, cold love that she is, continues to slowly drift away from the Earth, increasing the space between by something near an inch-and-one-half each year.

Consider this, without the Moon’s gravity clasping us steady, we and our blue planet would soon rotate wildly, wobbling without control as a top spinning down just prior to crashing to the floor and skittering to a stop.  Climates here would shift entirely in only years or months—ice ages coming and going with the rapidity of our present seasons.

And if that is not enough change for you, then contemplate our Sun as it gradually consumes itself and fizzles down.  Near the end of days, it will reach out, as if in final desperation, abruptly superheating and enveloping, consuming all of the solar system and the planets still circling as beads swirled in a salad bowl.

The Moon is fixed only in our best dreams, those softly lighted, and others where words come easy.  Dreams in which white doves flutter down bearing pure sugar cubes—ours for the taking.  The Moon pulls tides over us like blankets.  She strolls quietly though the tall trees along the mountains.  All the time plotting her eventual departure.

The Sun, now bright, but caught in a self-consuming waltz.

We, too, plan our leave.  Our strategy not nearly as inexorable as that of the Sun.  Our plans for departure alarmingly recent.  With rockets we climb the thin black skies.  In the Apollo missions we left at 35,000 feet per second.  But we came back again.

Someday we must leave for good.  We must go because the Moon and the Sun conspire against us, because we cannot stay here forever, because even lowly rock doves scatter as we reach for them.

Mitchell Hegman

NOTE: This is an entry from my 1999 journal.  I no longer recall what triggered me to write this.  I also have a nagging suspicion I may have posted a version of this previously.  Nonetheless, here we are.