{"id":16556,"date":"2009-07-20T17:33:54","date_gmt":"2009-07-20T22:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=16556"},"modified":"2009-07-20T18:29:50","modified_gmt":"2009-07-20T23:29:50","slug":"40th-anniversary-firstman-on-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/40th-anniversary-firstman-on-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day Our Reach Exceeded Our Dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"

July 20, 1969.<\/strong> I can’t remember exactly what time of day it was when we watched the first man walk on the moon. Was it dark? Was it daylight? Living in Watsonville, a small-town in rural California, my 14-year old mind had fantastical thoughts, sometimes foreboding ones, about how and whether or not these men, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and\u0412\u00a0Mike Collins\u0412\u00a0were actually alright.<\/p>\n

\"Apollo<\/a>
Apollo 11 liftoff from launch tower camera. Photo: NASA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Already having lived through three assasinations in recent memory –\u0412\u00a0President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., would these men be safe and sound and actually on the moon? In the Uranus-Pluto inspired upheaval that was the 1960s, we had already\u0412\u00a0grown used\u0412\u00a0to associating disaster\u0412\u00a0looming in the background of major public events.<\/p>\n

I remember an image of the corner foot\u0412\u00a0of the\u0412\u00a0lunar landing vehicle coming closer and closer to the\u0412\u00a0\u0412\u00a0surface of the moon. I\u0412\u00a0called my sister in to watch as it was closing in on the moon.\u0412\u00a0We were\u0412\u00a0watching actual footage of the lunar surface — a grey, dusty and craterous place. This was no longer a\u0412\u00a0distant light, but an actual hard, material place.<\/p>\n

Not quite believing, yet fighting disbelief, what was coming to us on our TVs, live and right before our eyes was an end to legend and folktale.<\/p>\n

I remember vividly Mama’s words, recalling her own\u0412\u00a0adolescence in Santiago,\u0412\u00a0Philippines\u0412\u00a0before the Japanese occupation of World War II. \u0412\u00a0“You know, when I was your age, I was cooking on a stove made out of stones, with a wood fire we had to keep up during the day. We butchered our own pigs, grew our vegetables, and harvested our own rice. The moon was just a source of light. ”<\/p>\n

Then she shook her head as she said “I never dreamed I would ever be alive to see this.”<\/p>\n

I remember watching the Miss Universe pageant that evening which broadcast an earlier taping of the contestants watching the first man walk on the moon. Some of the women were holding their mouths, gasping and\u0412\u00a0in tears. It was a\u0412\u00a0watershed moment in\u0412\u00a0the history of our country, the planet\u0412\u00a0and\u0412\u00a0our generation across the world. This was when we pushed down the walls of global mythology that impossibly distanced us from the stars.<\/p>\n

Forty years ago, on this day, our\u0412\u00a0reach exceeded our dreams.\u0412\u00a0On that day we stood watching, riveted, from living room to street corners — anywhere\u0412\u00a0with television sets on\u0412\u00a0across the country and around the world.\u0412\u00a0In a turn of the globe, the world as we knew it\u0412\u00a0had\u0412\u00a0irrevocably changed, and we thought, somewhat innocently, anything and everything was possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 20, 1969. I can’t remember exactly what time of day it was when we watched the first man walk on the moon. Was it dark? Was it daylight? Living in Watsonville, a small-town in rural California, my 14-year old mind had fantastical thoughts, sometimes foreboding ones, about how and whether or not these men, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1537,29,1535,1539,1287,1538],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16556"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}