After I pressed "New Post"

...I sat here and stared at the broad expanse of empty space that Blogger kindly provided. And stared. And stared some more. Suddenly I thought of a poem I wrote a while back.

Poem, Untitled

The page is blank, like my life.
All sorts of subjects flit through my mind
On the way to somewhere else
But not one settles down, makes itself
Comfortable, takes root, or starts to grow
Upward toward the light that arches
High above, beckoning all things to
Itself, not a single one.

The page is empty, like my brain.
I want to write a poem
But nothing comes to mind,
Only a formless maelstrom,
Swirling like one of the
Hundred million galaxies
Out there in the cosmos,
Moving toward the light.

Change the word poem in the title and the tenth line to blogpost and you begin to grasp my level of frustration.

Writing a blogpost and writing a poem are not at all alike. One (if the one is me) can research a particular topic for a blogpost, or one (again, if the one is me) can stumble upon an interesting subject unexpectedly, and a blogpost is often the happy result. A poem, on the other hand, often begins composing itself somewhere deep in my subconscious, slowly emerges into the part of my brain that is awake, and eventually makes its way to my fingertips and onto the page. But not always. Sometimes a poem springs full-grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus; sometimes it creeps out, word by painfully thought-out word.

I may be exaggerating, but only a little.

That being said, take a look at this:

NASA released this updated version of Voyager 1's famous "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth earlier this year, in February. The original was taken 30 years earlier, on Feb. 14, 1990. (Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The original, darker, unenhanced photo, along with some words penned by astronomer Carl Sagan in 1994 that you really ought to read, can be found right here.

Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral on September 5, 1977. The "pale blue dot" photograph was taken on February 13, 1990, nearly 13 years later. Voyager 1's journey continues today, more than 30 years after it was launched. It is the man-made object most distant from earth, currently more than 13.8 billion (e9) miles, or 148.5 AU (astronomical units) away from us according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

(Note. According to what I found, an astronomical unit (AU) is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun and equal to about 150 million kilometres (93 million miles). However, that distance varies as Earth orbits the Sun, from a maximum (aphelion) to a minimum (perihelion) and back again once a year. Originally conceived as the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion, since 2012 it has been defined as exactly 149,597,870,700 metres.)

Any way you look at it, that's a long way, baby.

Suddenly the broad expanse of space provided to me by Blogger doesn't seem so daunting.

It was Heraclitus, I think

...who said in the fifth century B.C., “The only permanent thing is change,” only he said it in Greek, of course, unless he didn’t say it at all, which is also a possibility. And if he didn’t say it at all, he said something very much like it: “No man steps in the same river twice” -- except it turns out he didn’t say that either. But “The only permanent thing is change” is a fair summation of what he is supposed to have said or not said, if you get my drift. So much for my exhaustive research.

I have been thinking of Heraclitus the last few mornings when I have taken Jethro out for his daily constitutionals around dawn. Dawn itself changes every day, being a little later each morning as our Earth moves around in its orbit, imperceptibly, and the direct rays of the sun at its zenith get a little farther south each day toward the Tropic of Capricorn because of the 23-and-a-half degree tilt of Earth’s axis. And when the direct rays of the sun at its zenith reach the Tropic of Capricorn, they will reverse themselves and start to move northward and dawn will become a little earlier each morning once again until the Earth is on the opposite side of its orbit and the direct rays of the sun at its zenith reach the Tropic of Cancer, when the whole 365-and-one-quarter-days cycle begins again.

I know too much astronomical trivia for my own good.

Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve been taking Jethro out around dawn and gazing up into the sky at a time when it isn’t night any more but it really isn’t day yet either. And do you know what I see?

Four lights.

The waning moon, the planet Venus, the dog star Sirius, and -- high overhead -- the planet Jupiter.

I know, to quote Carl Sagan, that there are “billions and billions” of stars out there, some of which, if I had ventured outdoors an hour earlier, I could have seen plainly. And even though they were all still there, I couldn’t see them at all. And had I waited another hour, even the four lights I did see would have been obscured in the light of old Sol.

You just know I’m going to make a Christian comment here.

Here goes:

In a universe where everything is changing constantly, where even rivers change in the length of time it takes to put your foot in, take it out, and put it in again, where one day Angelina Jolie is going to marry Brad Pitt and the next day she’s not, I’m so glad that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8) and that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variation or shadow of turning (James 1:17).

Yes, I am.

(Image from stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/oricma-p.html)