On Arriving

On Arriving

To Mom. First and foremost, because people always dedicate something to mom and also because I certainly love mine. She’s one of the strongest women I know. I wouldn’t be here without you, and I wouldn’t have found my God without your prayers. I will forever thank you for having faith in God’s plan. You gave me enough time to grow, long after I left home. For that, I will be forever indebted to you. Love you, Mom. Left for whoever finds it, and faces the same direction.

I

Do you know what the sky was doing the season you were made?

No one can name the hour a life begins. Conception is a span of days, a soft window through which a being slips into the world, not a struck bell with one clean note. There was never a clock to match against the sky: only a season, and the question of what that season was doing while it made a person.

What it was doing was learning to look outward.

In 1983 a small satellite wheeled above the Earth in the cold, watching the heavens in a light no eye can see. It was the first to survey the whole sky from space in the far infrared, and among the things it found was a faint ring of dust circling a star called Vega, the brightest blue lantern of the northern summer. Not a planet. The dust of small worlds grinding together: the leftovers of a making, or of one that never quite happened. For the first time, there was reason to believe other suns kept gardens of their own.¹

That June, Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Neptune, then the outermost planet, and became the first thing we had ever made to travel beyond the planets: a first step into the void.²

In those years a storyteller who loved the sky was writing a message that would arrive from Vega across the dark: proof of company, an invitation to listen. The real Vega was waking into a new kind of attention in the very months a certain life was being made, and the imagined one was already on its way. The dust was being seen as the person was being formed.³

II

I’ve considered that the timing means something. Then, more often than not, I’ve set the thought back down where I found it, the way you pocket a stone on a walk and leave it on the sill by the door. Let the finder be careful here. A mind casts a net of meaning over a generous, accidental universe and is rarely surprised to haul something up. Jung called the catch that feels meant synchronicity, joined by meaning alone.⁴ There is a difference between a pattern found and a pattern laid down, and no proof is offered for the second. The cosmos did not pause to arrange a star and a first step into the void as a gift for one small arrival. That is not the claim.

III

But my philosophy would tell me that Intent is real, even when it belongs to a person and not the sky. We are the part of the universe that asks what it is for. If one life leaned, always, toward the unseen thing just past the edge of the known, it costs nothing, and gives something, to notice it began in the season we first glimpsed the dust of other worlds. No one need be sent to feel summoned. The summons can be the work of attention itself, turned back across the years to say: this. This is the direction always faced.

Vega is twenty-five light-years away.⁵ The light that one life was born under had left that star a quarter-century before the first breath. We are made of star-stuff, Sagan said.⁶ A newborn under Vega, then, is starlight looked at by star-stuff: light observing light. A trace, traced backward.

I would imagine every arrival has a star like it, for anyone willing to trace the light back. Yours too, whatever the sky was doing that season. A person can rest quite happily inside that fact — tuned by nothing more than choice and wonder to a frequency already on its way.

Notes

1. IRAS, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, launched on January 25, 1983, and observed until November 21 of that year, making the first survey of the whole sky from space in the far infrared; earlier surveys from the ground and from rockets had covered parts of it. During a routine calibration observation of Vega it found much more long-wavelength infrared light than the star itself could account for: the first good evidence of solid material circling another ordinary star. The discoverers first described it as a shell. It is now understood as a debris disk, second-generation dust ground from colliding bodies rather than the primordial material planets are built from; imaged in the mid-infrared by JWST, it is strikingly smooth and symmetric, which argues against any Saturn-mass planet orbiting beyond about ten astronomical units. Stars with such disks are still said to show the “Vega phenomenon.” Neugebauer et al., “IRAS Mission”; Aumann et al., “Discovery of a Shell”; Su et al., “Imaging of the Vega Debris System.”

2. Pioneer 10, launched in March 1972, crossed the orbit of Neptune on June 13, 1983; with Pluto then inside Neptune’s orbit, that made it the first human-made object to go beyond the farthest planet. NASA Science, “Pioneer 10.” Richard Fimmel, NASA’s Pioneer project manager, told the Christian Science Monitor that day, “One might look at it as man’s first step into interplanetary travel.” Osterlund, “Pioneer Treks beyond the Planets.”

3. Sagan, Contact. The novel’s first confirmed signal comes from the direction of Vega. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan began the story in 1979 as a film treatment, which they finished in November 1980, before IRAS flew; the novel appeared in 1985. Vega had also been watched long before: it was a pole star in the deep past and will be again, and the first star after the Sun to be photographed.

4. Jung, “Synchronicity.” Jung’s word for a coincidence in which something felt within and something met in the world seem to answer each other, linked, as he held, by meaning and by no cause. Nothing here requires the coincidence to have been arranged.

5. Vega lies 25.04 ± 0.07 light-years from Earth, 7.68 parsecs, by the revised reduction of the Hipparcos parallaxes; the star is too bright for a reliable parallax from Gaia. The light over any newborn’s first night left it about a quarter-century before. Van Leeuwen, “Validation.”

6. Sagan, Druyan, and Soter, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, episode 1, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.” In this opening episode of the television series, Sagan says: “We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The elements in a body heavier than hydrogen and helium were, almost all of them, forged in earlier stars. Reading starlight on such a body as light observing light is mine.

Bibliography

Aumann, H. H., F. C. Gillett, C. A. Beichman, et al. “Discovery of a Shell around Alpha Lyrae.” Astrophysical Journal 278 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1086/184214.

Jung, C. G. “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 8. Princeton University Press, 1969.

NASA Science. “Pioneer 10.” Last updated November 6, 2024. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/pioneer-10.

Neugebauer, G., H. J. Habing, R. van Duinen, et al. “The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) Mission.” Astrophysical Journal 278 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1086/184209.

Osterlund, Peter. “Pioneer Treks beyond the Planets for Firsthand View of Outer Space.” Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 1983. https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0613/061353.html.

Sagan, Carl. Contact. Simon and Schuster, 1985.

Sagan, Carl, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, writers. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Episode 1, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.” PBS, 1980.

Su, Kate Y. L., András Gáspár, George H. Rieke, et al. “Imaging of the Vega Debris System Using JWST/MIRI.” Astrophysical Journal 977, no. 2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad8cde.

van Leeuwen, Floor. “Validation of the New Hipparcos Reduction.” Astronomy and Astrophysics 474, no. 2 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:20078357.

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