Mary Beth Danielson’s
Prairie Dog Quadrilateral
June 7, 2015 Volume 109
“The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are.
Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Quadrilateral: “How do we know if something is true?”
 Scripture – Whatever document we hold as True. For most Americans, that is the Bible.
 Tradition – The history of how people have handled themselves and structured their comings and
goings in situations of ordinary and extraordinary life.
 Reason – The logic of the world around us, i.e. the Sciences.
 Experience – Our own paths through life; what has and has not worked for us.
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Dear Friends,
There was a goodly amount of fog this week.
Southeast Wisconsin cannot decide if it is going
to do summer this year or it is just going to drag
us through another season of “Well, at least it’s
not snowing.”
This is from Sky and Telescope, in case you
would like to see what your visible stars and
planets will be this coming week.
I saw Jupiter first, super big and bright over Bill
and Pam’s house. Up to the left of it was a
smaller dot. I was unaccountably happy to
learn, when we came back in the house and Len
found this map of our sky, that the bright star I
saw is Regulus. Such a Harry Potter name! And
of course it’s Harry Potter because JK Rowling
knew her classic literature and named powerful
people and things in her books after them.
Thursday evening Len and I walked out to the
lake. We saw this something like this (this pix is
by Len, although it is clearer than the ones he
took Thurs night without the tripod. So we’ll
just go with that, OK?)
I just now texted the kid who consumed Harry
Potter books from second grade on. She was
barely big enough to pick them up but boy, that
kid lived and breathed the adventure, drama,
and battle between good and evil that is Harry
Potter. Guess who is the probation officer
now?
Here’s her synopsis. Regulus was the brother of
Sirius. Through most of the stories, Regulus is
the arrogant, power-seeking, suit wearing,
career oriented brother. We don’t like him, he
despises those who are not pure-blooded as he
and his family and friends are. Sirius is the older
What we actually saw was this:
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brother from the Black family; he’s the ‘hippie”
who helps fight Voldemort all along the way. In
the end, the very end, Regulus also switched
sides, when he understood that seeking what’s
right and orderly means he has to fight the
hypocritical powers that mislead him.
launched this robotic spacecraft on a mission to
study the outer Solar System and eventually
interstellar space.
Voyager 1, which had completed its primary
mission and was leaving the Solar System, was
commanded by NASA to turn its camera around
and take one last photograph of Earth across a
great expanse of space.
Gosh, do we ever seen stories like this around
us?
Len and I saw Venus down and to the right.
Because the night was somewhat veiled by
atmosphere, I didn’t see the twins, Pollux and
Castor – but wouldn’t those be good names for
kittens or calves?
It had been a long slog of a week, as most of
them are. A guy in my program told me, in a
quiet moment, that he found out his young kids
were frightened by the former boyfriend of his
children’s mom. She has evicted that bad guy
from her life, but my guy had tears in his eyes. I
try to not take stuff like that home with me, but
guess what pops into my mind sometimes,
especially when I look up at the dark velvet
night?
I saw on Facebook that my cousin’s stepson,
who lost both of his legs in a horrendous IED
explosion in Iraq; that this week he received a
new, beautiful, barrier-defying home from the
organization that funds homes for wounded
vets. I am glad for him. I cannot fathom the
pain and loss that brought him and his family to
this moment.
Do you see the half-pixel dot that is half way up
the photo, on the right side, in the faint white
ray of sunlight?
Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth
taken February 14, 1990 from 3.7 billion miles
away, as part of the Family Portrait series of
images of the Solar System.
The sky, when we look up, asks our point of
reference. Who do we think we are? Where do
we place our hopes, fears, energy, and need to
love and be loved? What’s the center of our
thinking?
In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less
than a pixel; our planet appears as a tiny dot
against the vastness of space, among bands of
sunlight scattered by the camera's optics.[1]
The photo on the cover is a composite of real
photographs taken by Voyager I. In 1977, NASA
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motorcycle headfirst and backwards into a tree.
We came home.
(Much of this explanation is from Wikipedia)
What can we do with a reality like this? This
pale blue dot is where we live, friends. This
ought to at least affect our point of reference as
we make our plans, do our work, and live our
lives.
The name is of the man who was driving the
motorcycle is not yet released, but we know he
died at this site.
My point of reference last night was a beautiful
tree overlooking Lake Michigan, one block from
my house, where a man lost his life.
Yesterday, while eating soggy cereal on the
sofa, one of my bottom molars fell apart in my
mouth. I had been to the dentist earlier this
week because I could tell that something was
going wrong. He said the tooth was cracked so I
made an apt to get a crown – this coming week.
One of my children said this to me once. She
was explaining why she went to church. “I think
it is important to remember that I am not the
point of the world.”
My tooth didn’t wait.
Suddenly the point of reference for everything I
know, do, and plan to do was located in a
wiggling, partially connected, partially
disconnected tooth in the back of my mouth.
In a few hours we are going to meet our
daughters and our niece, just flying in from
California, at a restaurant in the Chicago area.
For the hour or two we are there, I know that
my point of reference is going to be their lovely
faces. I am going to remember my mom, who
set in motion some nice daughters who would
raise more nice daughters. There is a smartness
and kindness that was in my mom, which
probably came from her mom and the mothers
before her, that is in these three young women
now. It would be hard to find a woman from
our tribe who was thoughtless or lazy or
outright mean.
I did what I have never had to do before. I called
the emergency number from the dentists’ office
recording. The dentist’s wife said she would
give him the message. He called me back and at
5:30 yesterday afternoon I went to Dr.
Reesman’s office. He fixed it enough to get me
through to next week.
My point of reference for my life moved back
out of my mouth.
There was an accident scene on Lighthouse
Drive, the road we turn from to get to our
house. We walked out to look, saw a
Do you have strains of character like this in your
family? Do you have traits that come from
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generations of forebears who held common
values as their point of reference? Who were
unfailingly honest? Or smart? Conniving or
creative? Handy with tools? Athletic?
Generous?
arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by
the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the
scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some
other corner, how frequent their
misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill
one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of
the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals
and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they
could become the momentary masters of a
fraction of a dot.
What we hold too over time as our point of
reference - determines who we will be- and
how long and well our Pale Blue Dot will
survive.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,
the delusion that we have some privileged
position in the Universe, are challenged by this
point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in
the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our
obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint
that help will come from elsewhere to save us
from ourselves.
Have a good week, Friends.
Mary Beth
The Earth is the only world known so far to
harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the
near future, to which our species could migrate.
Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the
moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling
and character-building experience. There is
perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of
human conceits than this distant image of our
tiny world. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly with one
another, and to preserve and cherish the pale
blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the
Human Future in Space
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's
home. That's us. On it everyone you love,
everyone you know, everyone you ever heard
of, every human being who ever was, lived out
their lives. The aggregate of our joy and
suffering, thousands of confident religions,
ideologies, and economic doctrines, every
hunter and forager, every hero and coward,
every creator and destroyer of civilization, every
king and peasant, every young couple in love,
every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor
and explorer, every teacher of morals, every
corrupt politician, every "superstar," every
"supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the
history of our species lived there-on a mote of
dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic
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