The Grand Coincidence
Certain things make sense to me, when I contemplate the big picture, like the moon and the stars. And that there could be a science to charting the course and crossings of the planets and stars in the sky and their influence in your life.
When I look around at the systems at work in our physical lives, our waking human experience in existence with the forces of nature, weather systems, and the greater Universal laws at work, the ones we understand and the ones we don't, it makes sense to me that there is a complex intelligent matrix of connection, cause, effect, and influence.
What it all means, and how it all works, I don't know with great precision, but over the years I’ve been tapping into the greater consciousness and intelligence that exists in these systems, nature forces, and weather's energies and harnessing the energetics to incite change...
Solar eclipses are an interesting phenomenon when you look at what's happening at a larger than your own life scale. A total solar eclipse happens only when the earth, the moon, and the sun are in perfect alignment and perfect distance apart from each other at just a perfect point in time and space. Scientists call this the Grand Coincidence, the moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun, the Sun is 400 times larger than the moon, so for the Moon to be able to block the Sun's rays completely by passing between the Earth and the Sun, it must be at the perfect distance away from the Earth to create a total Solar Eclipse, hence the Grand Coincidence.
Today I found myself, upon waking, recalling a dream I was having about an exboyfriend I'd stop talking to a few years ago. We'd been lovers since Spanish class my senior year in college.
However, a few years ago, we'd said our last goodbye in the Atlanta airport.
When I received his text message asking me to contact him, I didn't realize he was at the Atlanta airport waiting for his transport to Afghanistan. I was on the east coast and returning to Seattle through Atlanta. At the time it was a total coincidence that he was at the Atlanta airport, and I was on my way to the Atlanta airport. He was stationed in Germany and I was living in Seattle, so neither of us even belonged on the east coast, our planes crossing in Atlanta would then be headed in opposite directions across the globe.
Mark was leaving for his third, and hopeful, final tour in Afghanistan. He was a Captain in the US Army and he'd been serving since we graduated college.
When I got off the plane in Atlanta, the last I'd heard from him was that there was a possibility we'd overlap in the airport, and if he could make it happen he wanted to see me before he left for Afghanistan. When I walked off the tarmac and up the ramp and into the building, wheeling my travel size suitcase, he wasn't there. I looked for a long time, my eyes searching the scene for him.
I remember thinking, "Well, I guess it wasn't meant to be."
I began to walk to find my next gate on my way home to Seattle.
And then, he was there, walking down the aisle in his desert camouflage and carrying his rucksack.
I could see him, unchanged, still strikingly good looking, perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect uniform, perfect 6 foot 4. Mark is a massive strong individual, and he is a vision of patriotic perfection. I loved him.
I went through all of the motions in my head, I ran up to him, dropped everything I was carrying to the ground, jumped into his arms, and wrapped my arms around his neck. Just like you see on TV when the soldiers come home.
But he wasn't coming home, he was leaving, and the two of us, we didn't have emotional exchanges like that.
Instead we greeted each other. We walked together.
I went with him as close as I could go as a civilian to his transport in the airport. And there we sat and ate sushi. He couldn't drink a beer. We made small talk. He said "I wish I could take you from here and go out with you in Atlanta like we did that one time in St Louis." I remembered, I had worn a green silk dress and gold heels to dinner, and he drank expensive scotch in his perfectly tailored jacket and fancy watch.
That time when we met in St Louis, we hadn't seen each other in 12 years, and it was like no time had passed, and neither of us had changed.... much... I was more jaded. I had had my heartbroken a few more times. He was more stoic, he had been to Iraq a few times. We made a go of it again, that time. We had made three "gos of it" again since St Louis.
This time in the airport, in Atlanta, I was saying goodbye to him as he was leaving for his third tour of war. He got up to leave, paid for my sushi, and I stood up from the table as tall as I could make my five foot one and three quarter self.
This time in real life, I threw my arms around him and hugged him as tightly as I could, wanting him to understand that I meant it with everything I had.
"I love you," I said... and I think I had the guts to look him in the eye when I said it.
His head hung a little low as he said, "I don't want to go. Thank you for that. I think I needed that." But he never said he loved me.
A few days later, I wrote him, that I loved him, and I'd wait for him, and that I'd move to be with him, wherever he was, when he returned from Afghanistan. He wrote back. With consideration, kindness, and clarity, that I wasn't the one for him.
I stayed connected him through his third tour, made sure he'd returned safely from Afghanistan, and then I cut all ties with Mark.
I did this for me, after so many "gos of it", I had to let go of him. He had been clear in his response. I was the one holding on, I was the one who had hoped the coincidences of our meetings through the years, had meant the stars aligning in our individual houses of love and commitment. But this was no total eclipse, only the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun crossing each other in orbit, in that un-perfect distance.
So today, I awoke to a dream about Mark, he looked different, skinnier, but it was him. I gave him a hug and held him tightly, so he understood I meant it, with everything I had.
The Grand Coincidence is that the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size in the sky and their crossing paths occasionally creates a total solar eclipse. If the Moon were a different mass and size or it was a different distance from the Earth, it would have a different tidal effect on the Earth, and it wouldn't cause total eclipses. In fact they suppose that if anything about the size of the Moon and the distance of the Moon from the Earth would have been different it would have created a completely different tidal pull and created a completely different evolution of our limbed and upright species.
All these things we take for granted, being fundamental to life on Earth as we know it, and yet the only scientific explanation of the Sun and the Moon and the Earth aligning to create a total eclipse and the Moon being just the perfect size, distance, and mass to appear to be the same size in our sky as the 400 times larger Sun is that it is a Grand Coincidence.
Well, you know I don't believe in coincidences.
After waking up to that dream about Mark today, I looked him up on facebook. He had gotten married over the weekend.
Another alignment of stars and planets like this would not happen again until the year 2032.
“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.
You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time.
They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode.
So, forget Jesus.
The stars died so that you could be here today.”
— Lawrence M. Krauss
Dynamical, biological, and anthropic consequences of equal lunar and solar angular radii
Steven A. Balbus (Oxford University)
(Submitted on 2 Jun 2014)
The nearly equal lunar and solar angular sizes as subtended at the Earth is generally regarded as a coincidence. This is, however, an incidental consequence of the tidal forces from these bodies being comparable. Comparable magnitudes implies strong temporal modulation, as the forcing frequencies are nearly but not precisely equal. We suggest that on the basis of paleogeographic reconstructions, in the Devonian period, when the first tetrapods appeared on land, a large tidal range would accompany these modulated tides. This would have been conducive to the formation of a network of isolated tidal pools, lending support to A.S. Romer's classic idea that the evaporation of shallow pools was an evolutionary impetus for the development of chiridian limbs in aquatic tetrapodomorphs. Romer saw this as the reason for the existence of limbs, but strong selection pressure for terrestrial navigation would have been present even if the limbs were aquatic in origin. Since even a modest difference in the Moon's angular size relative to the Sun's would lead to a qualitatively different tidal modulation, the fact that we live on a planet with a Sun and Moon of close apparent size is not entirely coincidental: it may have an anthropic basis. arXiv:1406.0323v1 [astro-ph.EP]
