The Pale Blue Dot

Hello Stampers and Happy Wednesday!

When I first saw today's card, I knew I had to re-create it for you!  It is the work of super-stamper and fellow demonstrator Debbie McNeill.  I love its simplicity and also its message.  Check it out right now...

Isn't that just a great card?  Thanks go to Debbie for sharing it with me! The earth (from the stamp set The Open Sea, p. 104 of the Annual catalog), stamped in Baja Breeze reminded me of noted astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan's well-known comments on photos of the earth taken from deep space.  In case you aren't familiar with his book Pale Blue Dot here is an excerpt:

"We succeeded in taking that picture from deep space and, if you look at it, you see a dot.  That's here. That's home. That's us.  On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 arena.  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot.  How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.  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.  It is up to us.  To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." 

I'm writing this on Tuesday afternoon and I've purposely tuned out election returns so I have no idea who is ahead or behind, but I'll just say that if you find yourself on the losing side of things, take heart.  Because if you give the state of our world any serious thought, you'll realize that we're all pretty much losers.  Until we can suspend our proud, self-satisfied, and judgemental views and take action for the good of all, until no children go hungry, until no young women are forced into the sex trade, until we can learn to use our brains instead of guns to solve problems, until we can learn to put people before profits, until we can respect the earth, and the issues go on and on ... yep... we're all losers.  So we've all got a LOT of company and no one needs to feel left out today!

OK,stampers, I'll get down off my soapbox now and get back to stamping--- a very teensy, weensy
thing that happens on the pale blue dot, but one that gives joy and happiness. 

Don't forget to come back on Friday for another classic card.
Susan