A Toast for this Mayday 2024

So, two years ago I gave a toast at our May Eve Dinner, — some of you were there — at our former home, Moonflower Farm — where among many other erudite references I quoted Plutarch claiming that at Delphi, which was mostly a temple of Apollo, they also worshipped Dionysus, but only for three months of the year, and that this was because the ratio of the world’s maintenance to its destruction by fire is 3:1.  I thought I was making a poetic reference to my mother’s cremation, which had recently transpired — but a little over a month after I proposed that toast, a wildfire had burned our home and all our possessions.

So last year I was afraid to give a toast.

But, this year, throwing caution to the winds:

 I was thinking about how some of us will be sleeping “under the stars” this weekend — and how actually we all are.  Actually we will all sleep under the stars tonight, both under them and over them, and in between them — tucked in.

I was thinking about how some friends of mine are excited to send humans out into space — as if we’re not already in space.  As if the Earth, and all of us on it, were not already hurtling through space.  Some 70,000 mph relative to the Sun — but then if you think about it, the Sun is also moving. The Sun — and the Earth with it — are traveling some 500,000 mph relative to the center of the galaxy.  And the galaxy itself — well.

So, the Earth may be hurtling; or I guess from another perspective it’s just drifting.  It depends on what they call the “inertial frame”.  But in any case, it is most certainly moving through space, and there is no doubt that humanity is already, and have always been, from our earliest ancestors, spacefarers.

As I was thinking about all of this, I came across in an old book the remarkable analogy that if you emptied Waterloo Station — which is an enormous building in London — of everything but six specks of dust, if you took out all the people, all the trains, all the furniture, the sandwich carts, and all that was left was six tiny specks of dust — it would still be more crowded, with dust, than space is with stars.

The emptiness all around us is truly vast.

This of course brought to my mind the story that Alan Watts told from time to time — which as far as I can tell he made up, there’s no record of it anywhere outside his lectures — of an astronaut, returning to Earth who said:  “I have seen God; and She is black.”

All of which made me think of the seventeenth century French Benedictine Friar Pierre Pérignon — who is remembered by the traditional honorific “Dom”, Dom Pérignon — a monastic at an abbey in the Champagne region of France — who was inspecting some of the abbey’s wine, which had begun to referment in the bottle, and was in danger of exploding, and is supposed to have called out, “Brothers, brothers, come quickly!  I am drinking stars!”

And so.  Sisters!  Brothers!  Come quickly.  Stars above us, stars below us; stars outside us, stars within; we hurtle, we drift, through the vast emptiness of space; together.