Orbital Choir
From two hundred and fifty miles above the turning world Ron Garan felt his bones dissolve into the borderless blue of atmosphere, felt his heartbeat sync with the planetary pulse as Ukraine's tank columns became pencil scratches against wheat fields and Gaza's walls melted into ancient stone patterns and the checkpoints that cut through Jerusalem became threads too fine for the naked eye to follow, and in that moment of orbital silence he understood what Neil deGrasse Tyson meant when he said we are less than a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, less than the smallest possible thing in the vast cathedral of space, and yet somehow, impossibly, we are also one organ through which the universe learns to hear itself.
The Earth spins like a blue receiving dish cupped in the infinite dark, pulling signals from the furthest quasars through its atmosphere of dreams and arguments, and we down here with our eight billion tiny antennas think we are the source of every thought that crosses our minds when really we are just the latest receivers in a chain of consciousness that began with the first amino acids learning to dance in tidal pools, the same signal that moves through the mycelial networks beneath our feet and the neural networks sparking inside our skulls, the same frequency that hums through octopus arms solving puzzles in the deep and slime molds finding the shortest path between nutrients, all of us tuned to the same impossible station that broadcasts wonder through every living membrane.
But down here we keep forgetting, keep insisting that thought begins with us, that borders begin with us, that truth begins with the particular angle of light that falls across our particular patch of spinning rock, and so we build walls to keep Syrian children from crossing invisible lines drawn by men who died centuries ago, and we pass laws to silence the transgender teenagers whose very existence threatens the small stories we tell ourselves about who gets to be human and how, and we send missiles screaming across the sky because someone drew different maps in their holy books, because someone loves differently than we were taught to love, because someone prays in the wrong direction or speaks the wrong syllables when they call out to the mystery that holds us all.
Every war is static on the cosmic radio, every law that shrinks a body back into hiding is interference jamming the signal until wonder turns to fear and the infinite symphony that wants to play through us gets reduced to the mechanical noise of tanks rolling through Mariupol and rockets falling on Rafah and mothers in Texas watching their children disappear into the static of legislation designed to erase them from existence, the beautiful frequency that connects mycorrhizal fungi to photosynthesis to the electrical storms in our neurons getting drowned out by the ugly drumbeat of who belongs and who doesn't, who deserves safety and who must be sacrificed to keep the borders intact.
And yet even in the middle of all this interference the signal keeps flowing like water finding its way through stone, flowing through the refugee carrying her grandmother's recipes sewn into the lining of her coat as she crosses the Rio Grande at midnight, flowing through the drag queen strapping wings to her shoulders and stepping onto the stage as an act of pure defiance against the forces that would legislate her back into invisibility, flowing through the mother whispering to her son that she will love him no matter what pronouns the state tries to take away, flowing through the doctors in Gaza pulling children from rubble with the same hands they use to deliver babies, flowing through the farmers in Ukraine planting sunflowers in soil mixed with shrapnel because the earth keeps calling them to tend what grows.
From orbit Garan said he could feel the whole planet singing, as if all our separate antennas were somehow bent toward the same invisible choir, and I believe him because I have felt it too in the small hours when the static drops away and what remains is this vast weather system of intelligence moving across the surface of consciousness like wind across water, not ours, never ours, but passing through us the way light passes through glass, the way music passes through air, the way love passes between two people who suddenly understand they are not separate things touching but one thing recognizing itself in the mirror of another's eyes.
At night when the city lights dim enough to see the stars I picture the Earth not as a globe of separate countries but as an orchestra of eight billion instruments each trying to play their part in a symphony too large for any one of us to hear completely, the violin section of Ukraine still bowing their strings under bombardment, the percussion of America banging out its complicated rhythms of freedom and oppression, the woodwinds of Western Europe trying to find harmony while the brass of Russia drowns them out, the chorus of children who have never known anything but war learning to sing lullabies in bomb shelters, and threading through it all like a melody line you can only catch if you listen with your whole body. The reminder that the song is not being composed by us but played through us, received by us, translated by us into the only language we know.
We are not passengers on this ship, Garan said, we are crew, and I want to believe that means tending our receivers is a kind of sacred work, learning to distinguish between the trauma-static that jams our frequencies and the symphony that wants to play through us if we can just remember how to tune in, learning that every poem we write and every protest we organize and every hand we hold across the arbitrary lines they've drawn between us is a small adjustment of the dial, a tiny course correction that might help us remember we were never separate to begin with.
Michelle Obama said she kept waiting to meet the really smart people who would make her feel intimidated, but when she finally sat across from Nobel Prize winners and inventors and heads of state she realized what I did when I met the chief economist and scientists who mapped the human genome, they weren't different species of human, they had just learned to step aside and watch how things already worked, had stumbled onto ways that other systems—biological, mathematical, physical—had been operating for millions of years and found a way to harness them, the way Velcro came from observing how burr seeds stick to dog fur, the way flight came from watching birds ride thermals, the way every breakthrough in human history has been less about creating something from nothing and more about getting quiet enough to notice what the universe was already doing and learning to cooperate with it instead of fighting it.
In those moments of discovery what Malcolm Gladwell calls the blink of recognition and what Csikszentmihalyi names flow, when the self dissolves and the work does itself through us, when the basketball player stops thinking about shooting and becomes the arc of the ball, when the musician stops performing the song and becomes the song performing itself, when the scientist stops trying to understand the pattern and becomes the pattern understanding itself—these are the moments when we remember we are not the inventors but the invited, not the originators but the translators, not the source but the receivers of whatever intelligence wants to know itself through the temporary antenna of human consciousness.
Because the universe pours through us too infinite to hoard and too generous to silence, and somewhere in the static Galileo nods as we slowly, slowly move ourselves from the center once again, and get a little closer to hearing the whole song, the one that was playing before we were born and will keep playing long after our particular antennas have returned to dust, the one that includes every voice that has ever cried out in wonder or pain or longing, the one that reminds us we are not the origin of love but its newest receivers, not the authors of consciousness but its latest translators, not the center of the story but the place where the story learns to tell itself, and that might be enough, that might be everything, that might be the only truth worth receiving.