Happy Earth Day, Moon!

These days, I often crack open various doomy news sources and experience the equivalence of the sick fascination of watching a car crash: the Iran war, demented world leaders and their deluded followers, and more and more unchecked ecological destruction.

However, this past month, I enjoyed one news story: the voyage of Artemis 2 to the moon and back. The Artemis 2 journey could easily have been a “sickening car-crash” kind of spectacle. Who did not worry that the launch rockets would explode or the returning capsule would burn up in fiery explosions? The moon voyages are unbelievably complex mathematical and technological feats, so complicated they are ripe for disaster, but all went beautifully (with minor toilet glitches)—unlike that other “named” expedition the Americans are undertaking: “Epic Fury.” The Americans’ Iran war is also a huge technological and human investment, but it has been a spectacle of pointless and confusing destruction.

Is the Artemis mission also pointless? We don’t really have to go to the moon—that was why the Apollo missions stopped in the early 1970s. There’s no real purpose to it other than saying we went there, sort of like climbing Mount Everest. Although the boy billionaires, the Chinese monster-nation, and various corporate leviathans claim they will spend trillions of dollars to set up lunar base camps, mine the moon for minerals, and use it for—what? Nuclear bomb practice?-- it is hard to imagine these aims being any more probable than destroying Persian civilization without destroying yourself.

So why did I love watching the moon journey unfold? Why did it feel good and hopeful? Partly it was simple nostalgia. In July 1969 when the Apollo 11 astronauts walked on the moon, the first humans ever to do so, my family was on a cross-continental road trip from Edmonton, Alberta to San Diego, California and back. We were driving a big spaceship of an American sedan, maybe a Chrysler. Our vacation expedition probably took as long as the Apollo voyage to the moon. Somewhere along the way, we watched the lunar landing on a motel TV and were dazzled.

Over fifty years later, I felt lucky to be watching another moon voyage with my own kids and grandkids. As I watched Artemis events with my grandchildren, I experienced one of those strange “life is art” moments. A pattern clicked into place, a generational circle was made. I watched the launch with my son and his family in Toronto. And then, back home, my local grandson and I had great fun streaming the Artemis’s Orion splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. We added good wishes and Canadian flag emojis to the NASA chat, and my creative kid companion whipped up a wonderful cardboard model of the Artemis rocket, complete with launch cranes, capsule, plasma shield, and large bowl of water. Throughout the hour-and-a-half long approach to earth that we streamed, the two of us were bouncing with “moon joy,” a sweet term coined by the communications team on this mission.

Or was I caught up in “Earth joy”? Like many people, including the astronauts and NASA scientists, I was newly awe-struck by photos of Earth taken from the space craft. Having been a Space Age baby boomer child, I’ve grown up with images of Earth from space. But the jewel-like glimpses of our Earth as it orbits through the starry dark, were magical once again. It was glorious to see the Earth from angle after angle, bright blue moon-shape slice, swirling cloud-lit ball, earth-rise over moon horizon. Although the cratered, ashy moon photos were stark, solemn and strange, it was Earth I could hardly take my eyes from.

And it was hard to tear my eyes off the wild NASA chat as we streamed the splashdown. The chat scrolled along at a gallop as millions of earthbound people, besides us, added comments and emojis. Lots of American patriotism. A cornucopia of international delight and awe. Flags and good wishes and anxiety and congratulations. Christians posting proclamations that “Jesus is King” (which made me think: Jesus may be King, but Artemis is Goddess!) And the inevitable complaints about the obscene amount of money spent on space travel instead of feeding starving children, a position that I sympathize with.

And yet. In a terrible era like the one we’re in now, it was refreshing to witness, with my grandchildren, an amazing human journey. It was good to forget the stupid “Epic Fuzzy” mission, or maybe it just felt good to have that murderous endeavour set up against Artemis. “Artemis”, meet your evil twin: “Epic Fury.”

I wonder why organizations bestow names on these massive projects? Apparently, naming military missions became popular in World War 2. I was surprised to discover that the appalling US invasion of Grenada in the early 1980s was called “Urgent Fury.” What’s with all this epic and urgent fury, Americans?

However, humans tend to title almost anything when they want to give it distinctiveness or to enhance its specialness. The Odyssey is the name given to Homer’s tales about Odysseus but it is also the “name” of his journey. Books are titled. Jobs are titled. Big wigs in certain cultures are titled. Big military operations more and more are given very creepy titles. The moon missions are “named” for similar reasons, acknowledging the astonishing magnitude of the effort: “Apollo” in the 60s and 70s, and now the Artemis series of moon missions.

Artemis is a strange Greek deity. She is the goddess of the moon which is fitting for a NASA moon mission. Artemis is also female, so again, fitting since NASA is committed to putting more than just white men in space. However, unlike Hera or Aphrodite, Artemis is gender-complicated. She is a tough, independent, non-girlie Moon Goddess that not even the manosphere could accuse of being an enfeebling softie. She is fiercely celibate, carries weapons and often wears a short “male” tunic and is frequently accompanied by a big dog or a stag.

Artemis is “taking no shit from assholes” female power, in the flush of a healthy body, revelling in her moon menses, her athleticism, her independence. Every woman should get in touch with her inner Artemis considering how the Moon Goddess handled men who tried to assault or disrespect her.

Artemis is also associated with childbirth- the courage of it, I think, not the mothering. Maybe she is the dark, life-churning goddess at heart of the bloody pain of birthing, because she is also the goddess of hunting. Not wholesale, trophy slaughter, but hunting informed by the honoring of animals who feed and clothe us. She is a hunter committed to knowledge and care of the wilderness. Homer called Artemis the “The Mistress of Animals” . As a hunter, she is a deity of the woods and the wild where she protects animals and their necessary places. Like many respectful hunters, under her moon wing, she protects the natural systems and cycles that sustain the world, from birth to death.

So Artemis is not only a moon goddess but an Earth goddess—she is a bridge between male and female, earth and moon, blood and birth, sustenance and stewardship. She and the Artemis spaceships carry both moon joy and Earth joy.

On this Earth Day, I am glad to honour Artemis. I need a dose of remembering that Earth is our blessing, our foundation, our only true hope. We are as tied to Earth as is the moon. The Artemis moon voyage allowed us to see, through another generation of human eyes, Earth’s surreal, stunning, lonely beauty and to recognize our bond.

In fact, maybe that is what our moon journeys are all about. They do have a purpose: witnessing and reminding. Looking back at Earth from space fills us with a cosmic-infused sense of beauty and this kind of beauty is good for us. The late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue says, “Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming…. beauty is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.” (transcribed probably somewhat inaccurately from a podcast)

Seeing Earth from space provides that inner enrichment, that deep homecoming. In our day-to-day lives, as O’Donohue says elsewhere in his podcast, we desperately hang on to misery and pain and outrage and fear. I can’t stop the doom-scrolling. Yet when beauty assails me, I momentarily let go of that state of psychic pain. I am flung open-armed into a brief and buoyant sense of relief.

For most of us, especially when we see celestial panoramas, timelessness opens inside us for a split second. We experience an ineffable recognition of our connection to the cosmos. We get a dash of grace. This may be why we are drawn to sunsets and vistas. This feeling is why the Greeks had a goddess of the dawn. I suspect this feeling is why people were moved to write “Jesus is King” in the NASA chat as Orion was coming home. Awe that is an ancient.

Moon journeys feel like mechanisms of spiritual reorientation in this age of super technology and disconnection from our sacred Earth. In the same way that prayers or rituals or choirs in a Gothic cathedral do, moon journeys fill us with a fleeting awareness that we exist in and on a miracle. Surely this is in NASA’s mission statement.

Investing in moon travel is not more important than investing in helping any individual suffering here on Earth. But there are many many worse things we waste our money on. You can doom scroll a lengthy list: environmental carnage and pollution is the one I’m thinking of today along with the total waste of “Epic Fury.” The moon journeys might have intrinsic human value in the same way poetry or ritual dances or theoretical physics or cathedrals or Beethoven’s 9^th symphony do. Now that the lunar journey is no longer in the news, I go back to my doom scrolling, but I am more deeply aware of what O’Donohue calls my “unfolding” life.

Sadly, Artemis 2 might be America’s last NASA-driven moon mission. Apparently, Elon Musk’s Space-Ex will take over American space travelling: for profit. As David W. Brown said in The New Yorker: “When spaceflight is no longer the project of a nation but of billionaires, one wonders if it will still live up to the NASA motto: ‘For the benefit of all.’” One wonders, indeed. We’ll see what the Indian and Chinese nations bring us in the future.

And when I’m grumpy, I think about Artemis. How she firmly binds moon and Earth together with her sacred power. And, you know, I can’t see Artemis heading out to Mars with the billionaires. Take care Bros: don’t mess with Artemis. You’ve been warned.

Happy Earth Day, Moon!