And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.

The children of the sun, happy people whose eyes shone with a bright radiance and whose faces gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility.”
(paraphrasing Dostoyevsky, from <i>Notes from the Underground</i>).

I saw the entire earth as my home, and the sun, moon, and stars as intimate friends.

... it is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on Earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.

Earth: mostly harmless

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

Earth will be safe when we feel in us enough safety.

The earth together with its
surrounding waters must in fact have
such a shape as its shadow reveals,
for it eclipses the moon with the arc
of a perfect circle.
1543 AD

May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life.

Oh the Earth was made for lovers

Since I was a small boy, I had watched that forest for enemies or for game, and I knew its every mood and shading, how the sunlight fell through the leaves and where the shadows gathered. It held no mysteries for me but much of memory. I had played there as a child with Yance, Jubal, and Brian, later with Noelle. We had climbed its trees, picked berries there, and played hide-and-seek under its branches.

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

A little wisdom is indeed possible; but this blessed security have I found in all things, that they prefer — to DANCE on the feet of chance.

As kids we sat in grass, Fished our hands into the dirt. We felt that damp brown Universe writhe, alert & alive, Earth cupped in the boat of our palms.