Yesterday I drove into town on highway 20, crossing the tiny slice of our globe that extends from Sedro Wooley to Burlington, using the stored energy of that other prominent globe in our vicinity to power the engine of my jeep. This same celestial globe that millions of years ago provided the energy for my car was setting in the cold blue November sky. November is what we call it. The universe calls it point x on the orbit of planet number three–if it calls it anything at all. The sun was low on the horizon and its searing hot furnace shone so brightly in my eyes that it blinded me all the way in as the road and everything around me, including my moving car, tilted away from it. I had to pull down the visor and look askance to stay on the road. And I have to say that it was both glorious and a bit annoying at the same time. Then, later in the evening when darkness was setting, I drove back home again in the opposite direction, towards the East, and now the moon hung enormous over the opposite horizon, like a huge lantern guiding my way. Blinding sunset on the way out and floating moon to guide me back home. It’s tempting to think that this was all set up for me somehow, but in reality I just happened to align myself with the massive spinning cycles of the solar system in a notable and memorable way. But to be honest, I’m always a bit confused about the relationship between the earth, the sun and the moon. I know in principle, of course, which one orbits the other. But it’s the imagining of the thing in real-time that eludes me. It all seems too complicated for my little brain and so I usually just fall back on the habit of a million years: I treat these celestial objects as though they are rising and falling, not as though they were spinning and dancing around each other. And so when every once in a while I catch a glimpse of these churning globes as though happening right now, I pay attention. Content warning: the next sentence may cause vertigo. Right now, the earth is spinning. I don’t care how solid it feels or how flat it might look from the top of Mount Constitution or from a ski slope in North Vancouver, where you can see for 30 or 40 miles, or how much it functions as an utterly solid and unmovable foundation for every part of our life. We are right now sitting and standing on a spinning globe. Everyone except flat-earthers know this. But there is a difference between knowing something and imagining it. One time I was driving down to Portland on I5. It was six a.m. on another clear day, and somewhere around Tacoma I began witnessing the penumbra, those few minutes of half-light in which the sun has not yet risen, but the stars are no longer visible. The sky was an expanse of blue gradient, lighter on the jagged mountainous edge of the eastern horizon, and darker towards the west. And to the east also there formed out of the shadows Mount Rainier. Massive, majestically dominating the skyline. Calling everything around it, somehow, to greater heights. Above the mountain there were two other objects and two objects only, which stood out against the blue background: a large crescent moon and a bright star just below it. That bright star, I was certain, must be the planet Venus, the morning star. As I drove down the freeway, I tried to take in this amazing spectacle, this alignment of incomprehensibly large forces which I barely understood. So much beauty, so many pieces working together like a giant clockwork to create what I can only call art on a mind-boggling scale. No human artist could ever dream of creating something like this. They might see it and weep and despair at the limitations of the human imagination and the smallness of human power. But to the universe, this was just another Tuesday. I kept looking over to behold the sight, but my eyes would linger too long and when I looked back at the road I was straying from my lane like a drunk driver. And I was drunk. Drunk on the sky and the earth and magic of orbits and ancient volcanoes. From here, one might be forgiven to think that it was the volcano that spewed out the moon and the star. But in reality, it was the other way around. It was the planets and the moon and the sun that brought about the volcano by the endless wrestling of their gravitational forces. And it was these spinning orbits that spun me out and allowed me to witness their dazzling dance and dare to call it art.