Feast your eyes on this image of nebula N79 from the James Webb Space Telescope, that marvel of human ingenuity, creativity, and perseverance. Humans can do amazing things, despite being sometimes mercurial, selfish and destructive. I’ll admit to having outsized Maryland pride about JWST — as our very own Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) took the lead to manage, assemble, and test it. In 2009, I taught a graduate architecture studio where we designed a visitors center for Goddard. Our reward was two guided tours of the Goddard facilities — the coolest playground of labs, clean rooms, and maker spaces you can imagine. The brilliance and pride of the people working there was on full display with all their toys.

Around that same time, the lobby of my son’s pediatrician’s office building displayed a large scale model of JWST that we loved to admire. At some point, my son did a summer camp at the local community college led by an astrobiologist, if I’m remembering correctly. That camp was a blast. At the end, they gave paper-plate awards to the kids. Our son got “Most likely to check his hair in the JWST’s mirrors.”

To inspire a scene for chapter 17 of FLUX, I watched a video about JWST which yielded this screenshot. (youtu.be/rhF_CEepHMU).

Also watched a TED talk by Brian Swimme because why not? The whole idea of human consciousness accumulating over time in an ongoing developing “planetary mind” of collective invention and deepening relationships — just WOW. 🤯 💫 (Will be processing that for a while.)

Given this very engaging detour, it’s taken me longer than usual to finish chapter 17 of FLUX. (Couldn’t have done it w/o my writing group pals, including Mary Beth Rew Hicks.) It’ll go live tomorrow.