Anne's blog

The lat­ter part of Jan­u­ary and early Feb­ru­ary is potent: it is a time that we reflect upon and honor the fallen crews of Apollo 1, Chal­lenger, and Colum­bia, and all those who have lost their lives in the cause of explo­ration. Dur­ing these days of remem­brance, I would like to encour­age us all to reflect upon our space heroes while lis­ten­ing to the music of “Colum­bia: We Dare to Dream.”

STS-107 crew head­ing for the astrovan. photo credit: NASA

This music is all about THEM, and their accom­plish­ments and hopes and dreams. But it is also about OUR hopes and dreams. It is about us set­ting our sails and leav­ing those safe ports for the good of mankind. And it is about those very great things of the heav­ens, those things that brought all of us here together in the first place.

Music has power. It can change a day–and a life. It can direct our atten­tion towards some­thing that is hard to put a fin­ger on, but some­thing that is big­ger and nobler than words could ever say. And some­times music can show us the way.

So let’s take a few min­utes to stop and reflect and LISTEN. Our space heroes gave us their lives–let’s pause and give them some min­utes. Let’s try to *hear* them, their hearts, the ones who flew for us. Then we can go on with our busy day, but we will be changed–a bless­ing from our heroes, if you will. Our days can be filled with renewed pur­pose and ded­i­ca­tion and light, because we stopped to lis­ten to their souls, because we chose to emu­late them, walk in trib­ute to them.

© 2011 Anne Cabrera

Tags: astronauts, Columbia, heroes, hope, remembrance

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 at 2:02 am and is filed under Columbia CD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.