In the Fall of 1969, the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog came out. It’s a fantastic thing and it deserves to be written about but I want to talk about the cover. On the cover is a picture of the planet Earth as a small, beautiful blue planet in the center of a vast, dark universe. The picture was taken by the crew of the Apollo 11 only three months earlier when they became the first people ever to walk on the moon. “A giant step for mankind,” one of them said, and it was.
For the first time we could see ourselves as others see us, if there are others and they see the same way we do. Even though it’s the only distinct ‘thing’ in the picture and it is centered, we can see that we are part of something vaster than our little imaginations can probably even process.
I found it and still do even after much more advanced photographs have become public, both exhilarating and awe-inspiring.
How infinitesimal we are, all of us: bats, pelicans, spiders, earthworms, humans. In the Old Testament it says that we are ‘less than a speck of dust in the eye of G-d’. I heard that every Saturday morning at Saturday school. I believed it but I didn’t really have an image of it until I saw that picture.
One whole Earth. One jewel-like set of accidents. One small, unrepeatable miracle. And for one insignificant moment, I get to be a very tiny part of it.