Technique

We used to have planetarium team meetings at least once a semester where we'd get together and go over any new technical information about the system and talk about best practices for doing shows. Like any job, in the planetarium you're continually developing as a presenter, tweaking your vocabulary and refining your pacing and working on your laser pointer technique. After some months away from that, I miss it. I had my footing there, you know? I felt that seven years of working at something was enough to start to get good at it. And sure, there's a good plenty of transferable skills that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life, but there was a kind of comfort in being in a profession that you've seen personal growth in. You have a history to look back on and readily evaluate. It makes it easier to see your worth.

I remember one meeting where we talked about saying "it's pretty cool" when talking about astronomical objects during shows. The message was don't, but the thought behind it was bigger than unimaginative word choice. You could have said fantastic or fabulous or awe-inspiring or magnificent or marvelous or phenomenal or stupendous or tremendous and you would have had the same problem. When you bring up, say, a full sky picture of the Ring Nebula,

image from Hubble

the audience doesn't need to be told how cool it is. The sky speaks for itself. Your value judgment on it only takes away from the song it sings on its own.

When you talk about how interesting or exciting you find something in space, you're also telling the audience how to feel and that's not the goal with a planetarium show. You're there to teach, to present the information and let the people take what they will from it. We do have a little bit of a polemic when it comes to light pollution and space exploration and preserving the planet but I'd say that partially comes from seeing the Earth all alone in space so often. It's hard to keep that out. But still, you're not there to tell people what to believe, just to show them what's out there in space.

And it's a bit frightening, really, knowing that we get to choose what we believe. I know that the culture we're born into and grow up in and live in greatly dampens that choice, but at the end of the day, it's still there. All of our joy comes out of that. All of our pain too, but also all of our love. With the entire depth of the human experience at stake here, it's no wonder people fight over what to believe, or that those fights contain such vitriol. We have such precious freedom and we don't always know what to do with it.

There's a slow, quiet stillness as the sky wakes up and takes all the stars away and I always glossed over that in my shows. I made a moment of the sunset but sunrise was an afterthought, the thing you had to have in order to bring the lights back up and let the people back out into the world. I suppose people have always appreciated the beauty of a sunrise, when they're awake for one, and drawn meaning and comfort from it, but I was never one of them. There's a tiredness in the morning light to me. How anemic the sun's first rays seem!

But then, I was never one for pale beauty.

What I mean to say, I think, is that I have found for myself the things I believe to be true, even if I forget those things sometimes. We never stop changing as humans, I know, but I feel more solid than I once might have been. Ideas might push into me, but I retain my shape. I know what resonates with me, even if I might not know why at first. And the person that I am, she was always there throughout my life, just maybe a little more malleable in the past. I think that might be what happens as we age- the malleability fades until we become brittle.

I have a lifetime before that brittleness sets in, though, and I want to live it preserving our freedom to choose. I want to educate and I want to share information and I want to open up the world for people and help them to recognize and pick up and carry their burdens of love and care, but I think the step before all of that is preserving their choice. You have to let people find their truths for themselves. It won't be real otherwise.

And I think we'll be surprised by how much we agree on those truths.

After all, the sky speaks for itself.