Is It Really Such a Giant Leap?
Is it really such a giant leap
To unite the heart and mind?
To imagine love and logic keep
Common cause in what they find?
A man upon the moon once raised
With one small step all mankind.
The simple effort Armstrong praised
Gave vision to the blind;
To see the Earth from outerspace
Resting peaceful in the sky--
The astronaut’s Amazing Grace
Impossible to deny,
A transformation of consciousness,
A fragility profound,
A truth to which we were made witness
Simply by turning around
And looking upon ourselves, one whole,
Watching our planet rising,
Feeling its gravitational pull
From the lunar horizon.
Thus, we devoted our resources,
Engineering and physics
To harness all of our forces
And put brave lives at risk,
All our technology and science
Just bent on changing place,
So much noise just to stand in silence
The entire human race.
And here now gazing, you and I
At the moon but from afar
Two young lovers, earthbound and shy,
Contemplating who we are:
Inseparable from the cosmos
Two beings in existence
Two atoms drawn together close
Out of space, time and distance
Dependent on a calculation
Encompassing the whole
From the explosive inspiration
To the present moment’s toll—
Everything that ever was, no less,
Played a part in our romance,
Our tiny footprints’ soft impress,
Orchestrated cosmic dance.
Love, then, too and poetic verse
Owe the Big Bang their homage;
The ever unfolding universe
Calls us to make pilgrimage,
To follow reason’s tour de force
And evolving worldview,
To arrive at last back at the source,
Humble, wise and born anew.
Knowing ourselves as something more
Than the earth we look out from,
Experiencing as we explore
The whole from which we’ve come,
Our souls may take a giant leap,
As the self is re-defined;
All that we give up, all that we keep
Uniting the heart and mind.
