Quotes From Classes

“(Space) was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth...I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth...Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong...I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate connection I had been looking for between all living things...I discovered the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us...The ‘overview effect’....can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other. ”