Places to Go, Things To Do, People To See . . . but we should start with Home. Those Crazy Hip Blog Mamas chose as their Writing Collaboration Prompt this week the word “home.” I know this is likely to be the geekiest entry, and I’ve hesitated to post it, but I have to share my image of home.
This is where I live. This is where my heart is, and my mind, and the place that I want my son to feel comfortable.
The whole solar system. All of it. I want him to know all about the planets, the dwarf planets, the asteroids, the comets, and that big guy — the Sun. But more importantly than knowing facts and figures, what I want for him is a sense of wonder. I want him to gasp when he thinks about the boiling surface of Venus, the volcanos on Io, the forbidding ice on the outer planets, and the red rocks on Mars. I want him to be awed by the diversity in our Solar System, and to wonder how it was made. I want him to imagine what it would be like to visit the planets, through telescopes, with rovers, or to walk on it with his own two feet, as surely as he walks in the back yard now. Whether the answers for him involve interstellar dust and exploding stars or simply “God made it,” that’s okay with me. As long as he grasps the wonder and asks the questions. I want him to love this place as much as I do. To live, to breathe, to question, to understand, and to realize how much we have yet to learn.
From the bugs in our back yard to the microorganisms that may live under the ice on Europa, we live in worlds of wonder.
And every one of them has the power to unleash our imagination and spur us to better things.
Even Pluto.
