It’s a big day in the cosmos! Our Mama Earth has teetered just as far as she can possibly go giving us the longest day and the shortest night of the year, (unless you happen to be in the southern hemisphere of course). So Happy Solstice, wherever you may be!

Times like this are good for zooming out to the big picture and getting a bit of perspective. Goodness knows there are an endless number of unsettling stories to occupy our attention on any given day.

We humans, with all of our culture and society, take a lot of things for granted. As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, we can assume that there will be mail in the mailbox, bread at the bakery, and a new series on Netflix.

So many things in our world seem to be larger than life, unstoppable movements like commerce, agriculture, and trade. Yet they are all predicated on a tenuous balance between our human activity and the Earth that supports us.

It’s a marvel to contemplate the vast and complicated choreography that allows you to be sitting peacefully reading this newsletter. There’s nothing like taking the paleontologists point of view to make you appreciate our present moment!

In fact, when you think about what happened on this planet one random day about 66 million years ago you start to appreciate just how miraculous and splendid our lives are just now.

It was an ordinary morning in the prehistoric world. Imagine you were one of the small mammal-like creatures scurrying around in the lush undergrowth of the forests, just going about your business hoping to avoid becoming a dinosaur’s lunch. Suddenly the earth starts shaking violently, in fact thousands of times harder than the strongest modern earthquake.

Depending on where you may have been on that fateful day, you may have been burned to a crisp within moments, or perhaps it took a day or so for either fire, flood, or tsunami to do you in. Regardless of your locale, life on Earth very nearly ground to a complete halt in a relatively very short time. With 25 trillion metric tons of debris, dust, and soot clouding the atmosphere, no sunlight reached the surface of the Earth for months, photosynthesis ceased, and the carbon cycle nearly collapsed.

Sounds like one heck of a rotten day here on Planet Earth, right? I mean, when three-fourths of your fellow species are wiped off the map in one fell swoop and almost nothing more advanced than moss and lichen survives, I guess you’ve gotta just hope for the best. So what in heaven’s name happened?

Well, your small mammal-like distant cousin would have had no idea, but we moderns with our science and telescopes sure do. Our big green ball is orbiting around a much bigger brightly burning one, and we’re definitely not the only large object speeding through space.

On that fateful day that marked the end of the Cretaceous Period a six-mile-wide chunk of rock that happened to be hurtling through the neighborhood at about 45,000 miles per hour banged smack into what is now known as the Yucatan Peninsula. The asteroid, now referred to as Chicxulub for the nearby Mayan community, made a crater 18 miles deep and instantly set fire to everything within a thousand miles.

But here’s the kicker. Despite the staggering facts of that impact, were it not for our planets chance encounter with a random rock in the cosmos, YOU WOULD NOT BE HERE TODAY READING THIS NEWSLETTER! That’s right, according to the consensus among paleontologists who make a practice of knowing about such things, it’s only because the dinosaurs were wiped out that our miniature mammalian cousins were given a chance to evolve into the walking warm-blooded human family that we count ourselves part of today.

So on this special day of Solstice, let us be thankful that somehow the odds have favored us to be where we are at this precise moment! The many minor things we take for granted and the seemingly daunting issues we face are all but a grain of sand in the big picture of the universe! We’re been given the gift of consciousness and our lot here on Earth is to raise it, so lead on with love and let your higher good light your way!

Much love till next Monday!

M+

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine