Dinesh's photos

1977, Carl Sagan asked Toronto painter and radio producer Jon Lomberg how an artist might express the essence of human identity to an audience that had never seen humans. With fellow Cornell astrophysicist Frank Drake, Sagan had just been invited by NASA to devise something meaningful about humanity to accompany the twin Voyager spacecrafts, which would visit the outer planets and then continue on through interstellar space, possibly forever.

Autumn moonlight-- a worm digs silently into the chestnut. ~ Matsuo Basho

Michigan State University, East Lansing Michigan

"I know I am deathless…We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, / There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them." ~ Walt Whitman

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; So many things seem filled with the intent To be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster; Places, and names, and where it was you meant To travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last, or Next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And , vaster, Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident The art of losing’s not too hard to master Though it may look like (write it!) like disaster. “One art” ~ Elizabeth Bishop

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea, I am the wave of the ocean, I am the murmur of the billows I am the ox of the seven combats, I am the vulture upon the rocks, I am a beam of the sun, I am the fairest of the plants, I am the wild boar in valor, I am the salmon in the water, I am the lake in the plain, I am a word of science, I am the point of the lance of battle. I am the God who created in the head of fire, What is it who throws the light into the meeting on the mountains? Who announces the ages of the moon? Who teaches the place where couches the sun? If not I "This anonymous Irish poem from the bardic tradition that sounds like Walt Whitman and little like an old Vedic hymn, it’s been given title, “The Mystery” . The translation is by Yeats's friend Douglas Hyde" ~ Robert Hass

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe simpler than I could have begun to find words for not patient not even waiting no more hidden than the air itself that became part of me for a while with every breath and remained with me unnoticed something that was here unnamed unknown in the days and the nights not separate from them not separate from them as they came and were gone it must have been here neither early nor late then by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks ~ W.S. Merwin