Milky Way

Introduction

Vincent J. Fortunato

Each year, friends of ours hold a camping gathering (which they call Highland Hijinks) on property they own in High Valley, Idaho. The property is gorgeous and provides fantastic views of the night sky. This year, my friend Dan Mackey and I unpacked our telescopes and spent a few hours searching the night sky for planets and deep sky objects, such as nebulas and galaxies, to observe. Of course I had my camera with me. This photo captured a nice juxtaposition of both the Milky Way and the campfire where friends were gathered for the evening; and, to me, demonstrated clearly the interconnectedness between life on this planet and the vastness of the universe that we perceive. 

The following sentence from a book by David Hinton called China Root: Taoism, Ch'an and Original Zen) encapsulates the essence of what we are from the perspective of Ch’an (Zen):

“We are in our original nature the Cosmos aware of itself.

However, on a lighter, relevant, and irreverent note, I thought I would provide the following Youtube link to a scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

The Galaxy Song

Lyrics

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,

And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Eric Idle / John Du Prez

Galaxy Song lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group