Lost in Space

Carlos walked cautiously down the corridor behind a small group  talking softly among themselves.  He was grateful that his recovering body had the strength and balance to move him around.  It had been unmoving for a very long time.

The floor had a deliberate, gentle texture that he surmised was to increase traction in case someone was in a hurry, or if the floor shifted, or if a person was generally unsteady on their feet.  Having grown up in earthquake country, this seemed a reasonable precaution.  At the moment, things were very smooth and steady, with a soothing hum just below the bottom of his range of hearing, which he felt rather than heard.

The group turned into a wide door, and Carlos followed.  This room was elongated and had lobes to either end.  “It’s the shape of a kidney bean,” he thought, irrelevantly.  The entire room was made of sterile polished metal, but those gathered sat around the periphery of the bean on colorful blankets, cushions, small folding chairs.  All were silent. Some sat with eyes closed.  

Carlos found a vacant space and lay his nondescript blue ship’s blanket down in a folded square.  All of his distinctive personal possessions had been lost, he’d been told.  He recognized a couple of faces from earlier in the communal dining area, but didn’t know anyone from before. He sat down, crossed his legs, folded his hands, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, settling into worshipful silence as he had since he was a child in Quaker “meeting for worship.”

Carlitos felt a bit disoriented as he centered, and knew there were many pointless and unproductive directions his mind could wander in the silence of the meeting.  He’d been trained from an early age to empty his mind, and sometimes that worked.  He’d also learned to ground himself, by picturing the energy of his spine descending into the center of the earth.  How does one ground when they can’t feel the earth?  He centered nonetheless, and as he did so he felt a warm yellow bubble rising up through his body, and then splitting into a hundred smaller globes as it rose past his heart, into his mind, and up and up into outer space.  It was gratitude!

He had made it! he thought.  Here he was.  He’d left Earth in 2029, or at least, he had signed all of the paperwork, paid the exhorbitant cost of intergalactic travel, and entered cryogenic-sleep with around 300 other EarthQuakers who were ready to commit to creating a colony on Planet Serenity, a vast distance from their Earth home.  

It was an audacious thing to do, requiring courage and spiritual conviction.  Carlos knew, however, that he’d had help in his choice.  His cancer, a new one to medical science in,  was utterly incurable in 2029, and probably would be for years.  It was a gentle death sentence, which he knew well, having been a hospice and palliative care chaplain for years by the time of his own diagnosis.  He’d been unafraid of death since a bad motorcycle accident in 2023, but he was so curious about the tipping points in ecology, economics, ethics, spirituality, technology, and enlightenment which clearly loomed for humanity within the 21st century.  What would happen next?  It kept him awake many nights, even when he slept next to Mica in their tiny house, one of many inhabited by Quakers on the site of the old Ben Lomond Quaker Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

All of the trials of leaving Earth to travel through deep space were relativized by the trials of dying and traveling through deep mystery.  Since he was medically incurable, he had nothing to fear by cashing his life insurance policy and buying a passage.  He treated the year before his departure as he would a last year to live, connecting with loved ones, making memories, leaving behind special moments, and even having a kind of living funeral, which was full of tears and laughter as those present shared stories, gratitudes, and lessons they’d learned in their relationships with him.    

The ship's destination, planet Tranquility, had been a completely desolate place, with no plant or animal life, nor even a fossil record of any such, as far as the distance probes could report.  This was important to the EarthQuakers because they didn’t want to repeat the errors of earthly and intergalactic colonizers who had ego-centrically displaced, dispossessed, and obliterated native life when they set out to build new colonies, apparently having learned nothing from the European diasporas of the previous five centuries, nor the colonization of the place still called “Pennsylvania” for the Quaker who inherited that territory from his father, William Penn.  Being pacifists, and having extended their “Equality Testimony” to include all forms of life, the EarthQuakers were determined not to displace or destroy anything living as they strove to live into ways of life that coincided with their beliefs, their values.  

The EQs weren’t opposed to populating the planet Tranquility, however, and decades previously had sent the Eden to seed the vacant rock of Tranquility with a cornucopia of germs, soil, seeds, organisms, and even some…water.  The first seed freighter had dropped its payload and gone into orbit around Eden, its computers sending information back to Earth which revealed new life in Eden.  Miracles do happen, even if they need some technical and scientific help.

Carlos remembered the wars of the early 21st Century.  He remembered the pandemics.  He had protested the massive imbalance of wealth, exacerbated by the leadership of persons who stepped into the looming chaos without ethics. 

As the entire Equatorial band of the planet became too hot for prosperous human habitation, a planet-wide, multi-generational migration of dark-skinned Second and Third worlders, as they’d been called then, revealed all of the social fissures that still existed, and exacerbated them.  Artificial Intelligence provided technological innovation, but no parallel spiritual, ethical, or social evolution.  Trying to live out his Quaker beliefs and values was impossible, so that when his cancer diagnosis mirrored his ethical and spiritual declinel and the EarthQuaker colony ships were open for new travelers, Carlos knew he was ready to go.  

Now, here he was, in meeting for worship.  “What does it mean to ‘ground’ myself when I’m hurtling through intergalactic space?,” he pondered.  He breathed in the recycled air, and let it out again.  With the help of artificial gravity, his sits bones pressed down through the blanket, and he felt the firmness of the metal floor.  The ancient Peace rose in him as it had so often done on Earth.  

“What is Thy truth?”  A query came into his mind.  “What is Thy witness?”

He’d been part of the early EarthQuaker movement, when his work with minister siblings at the 2025 Virtual Friends General Conference had nourished a new understanding in his recently damaged brain.  He had set out into space with an EarthQuaker colony full of hope and promise.  But now what?

A gentle song from his childhood came into his mind as the silence deepened.  To his surprise, the song that Quakers had so often borrowed from their Shaker religious siblings rose into his throat:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
’tis the gift to come down where we ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
‘Till by turning, turning we come round right.

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
’tis the gift to come down where we ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.