Orbital

Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.

He’d told her once that if he were ever to be where she is, he’d spend his whole time in tears, helpless in the face of the earth’s bare beauty. But that he’d never be where she is because he’s a man who disappoints himself with his need of firm ground. He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are peo

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first. It’s utterly manifest in every detail of the view, just as the sculpting force of gravity has made a sphere of the planet and pushed and pulled the tides which shape the coasts, so has politics sculpted and shaped and left eviden

If they listen to the radio at all it’s often for music or else something with an innocence or ultimate neutrality about it, comedy or sport, something with a sense of play, of things mattering and then not mattering, of coming and going and leaving no mark.

so please know, my daughter, that you are not inferior and hold that grandly in your heart and live your inconsequential life as well as you can with a dignity of being, will you do that for me?

It’s not so much that the earth is one thing and the weather another, but that they’re the same. The earth is its air currents, the air currents the earth, just as a face is not separate from the expressions it makes.

The earth is a place of circular systems: growth and decomposition, rainfall and evaporation, alive with the cycling of air currents that shunt the weather around the continents. You know this of course, but in space you see it.

And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego b