From the Earth to the Moon and Back Again or Never to Return

Yesterday a co-worker friend brought to my attention a speech written by William Safire, which would have been delivered by President Nixon, in the event of a moon-landing disaster. I was promised that reading this speech would “send shivers down my spine”. Well, it did – and those shivers turned to ripples which swirled into an ocean of thought on the nature of man.

When my friend first brought this speech to my attention, he said something like, “Imagine how a landing disaster would have affected our view of the moon… each time we gazed upon it we would be reminded of the poor souls who were left to die and never return to Mother Earth.”

A provocative thought, indeed! A moon landing disaster would have changed the course of our history, for sure. It was a symbol of our greatness, of our ingenuity. It was also a source of great inspiration, and a means to express the camaraderie of the human spirit. I wish I had been alive to witness it. Just hearing the scratchy recording of “One small step for man…” brings tears to my eyes.

But what if it had never happened? How would we have viewed the moon henceforth?

I can imagine humankind projecting a sense of resentment onto the moon, as if it was the cause of our failure. I can also imagine those projections extending through all aspects of civilization – through the way we govern, the way we exchange money and property, the way we relate to our friends and family.

As much as exploring those possibilities interests me, something else interests me more. Instead I wonder – what would truly be behind those projections? Would it really be about failing to land on the moon? After all, negative feelings typically manifest for reasons other than what we think. Which this leads me to ask – what is behind the urge to land on the moon to begin with?

There is a popular concept in certain fringe psychological circles, which purports that the biggest trauma a person will ever experience is being born. I first learned this by way of Joseph Chilton Pearce, and then Stanislav Grof, both prominent writers on topics of psycho-spiritual development. The idea is that a human spends the most critical period of its development in a symbiotic state, protected inside the mother. Therefore, the act of being born – of being thrust through the birth canal by way of painful muscular contractions, of bursting into a harsh, cold, and foreign environment, and then being forced to receive oxygen via unfamiliar means, via lungs instead of placenta – is an enormously traumatic experience. It is the source of all primal fears. It is the reason for our inherent sense of alienation and insecurity. And so, we are forever left with a longing to return to the womb.

These are tall claims, for sure. But for me, they resonate. And upon reading this speech, they resonate even more.

How tantalizing is the moon, seemingly so nearby, yet impossibly out of reach. It’s like a forbidden fruit, lush and ripe and dangling from a vine. It feels like sustenance. Perhaps that is why we were so hungry for it, why we needed to stake our claim on it and say, “We are here. You belong to us.”

Consider the final line of the speech:

“For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”

Why is that such a comfort? Could it be we are unconsciously driven to conquer and consume to quell the pain of being born – to fill the void left from our first, and most significant, loss of connection?

Theory says that when our solar system was forming, the Earth was struck by a foreign body. It shattered in two, hurling the smaller fragment off into the deep. It spun away until the larger body secured it in its gravitational embrace. Thus, one could say: The Earth gave birth to the Moon.

The Moon is Earth’s child. We are Earth’s children. The Earth is God’s child. We are all God’s children.

And so, perhaps the wholeness we seek by way of consuming is misdirected. It can’t be found on the moon’s vistas, the ocean floors, or the desert sands. Perhaps there is an inner space worth pointing to. Perhaps that is where our true mother resides.