Before You Colonize the Moon...
can we please fix things here first?
Today, astronauts are coming home, back from the dark side of the Moon, back from that mythic, invisible face that’s haunted human imagination for millennia. They’ll splash down, do the press tour, and we’ll all agree it was magnificent.
And somewhere, Roger Waters (he’s still around) is rolling his eyes.
In 1973, Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon, and they were not talking about real estate. They were talking about us. About time hemorrhaging away while we’re not paying attention. About money making us mean. About the particular madness that sets in when human beings refuse, absolutely refuse, to look at themselves honestly. The album spent 950 weeks on the Billboard charts. Apparently we recognized something.
That something is that we’ve always known where the dark side lives. We just don't like to look.
You do not find yourself by leaving
Here’s what every mystical tradition that has ever existed, from the Sufi poets to the Vedantic sages to every esoteric tradition that ever mapped the inner world knows: you do not find yourself by leaving. You find yourself by staying. By sitting inside the discomfort of your own interior long enough for something true to surface. By feeling and acknowleging what we’ve been outsourcing to productivity, consumption, and apparently now, space travel.
There is an ancient word for this pattern of avoidance: acedia… not laziness, but the art of staying exquisitely busy with everything – except what matters most.
The inner landscape of humanity is crumbling, anxiety is through the roof, loneliness is epidemic, the collective grief with nowhere to go. We have not cracked loneliness, or grief, or the staggering human capacity for cruelty toward people slightly different from us.
We cannot export an unexamined civilization to another planet and expect different results. We’ll just have the same mess with a better view.
The real frontier has always been interior
The most radical act of exploration available to us right now is turning toward this Earth, these people, this moment – and doing the unglamorous, necessary, and deeply human work of becoming a species worthy of what we already have.
That work begins with each of us. Not with a mission. Not with a rocket. But with a willingness to feel what’s actually there, to look honestly at the interior landscape we’ve been too busy to visit, and to discover that what you find there is not the enemy. It is the map.
Travel with me
If you’re ready to explore and experiment with those inward steps, I invite you to join me at my next online Elevation Ceremony. It’s free, it’s monthly, and it asks only one thing: your honest, intentional presence. No prior experience required. Just curiosity, and the courage to look. You can find details and register here.
The mission that actually changes things doesn't leave the atmosphere. I hope you’ll join me.
With Love,
Becca