If you’d had the right kind of microphone, scientists say, you could have heard the trees screaming.

My auntie Barb has died. My Dad’s older sister. Sharp as a needle, funny and profoundly kind. Maybe my first role model and a person who saw me and loved me as I am from when I was a chaotic disaster youth all the way to middle age. She made 93. A life well lived. I will miss her always.

Theirs was a world of fear and chaos, with tiny islands of goodness and hope.

“It is imperative you exude merriment,” he stressed.

We’ve been going to Benjamin Dean lectures on and off since the kids were tiny. It’s pretty cool that our youngest, nigh-adult child now enjoys coming with us. Last month we looked at the Galilean moons, including Ganymede with its own magnetosphere and our beloved Europa. This month Stanford professor Susan Clark walked us through the magnetic fields in the interstellar medium (ISM), the dust and gas between the stars.

She was charmingly annoyed about this name. “I’m pretty sure oceanographers don’t study ‘the stuff between the whales.’ I don’t think atmospheric scientists study ‘the stuff between the birds.'” To be fair, she acknowledged, the parts of ISM that are dust show up as black blobs in visible light, like Barnard 68. But if your eyes could see into the infrared spectrum, you would see the stars beyond.

One cool thing about the dust is that its particles are amorphous; another cool thing is that they spin. As they spin, they align with magnetic fields. Because they’re aligned, they polarize the light from the stars behind them, and the heat radiation they emit. So that by examining the polarization of that distant light and heat – by seeing with different eyes – amazing observatories like Planck and Arecibo and SOFIA can map the magnetic fields between the stars. (That main image got projected onto the dome of the Morrison Planetarium. It was astounding. Collective intake of breath.)

Of course the Planck and SOFIA missions have ended, and Arecibo suffered catastrophic mechanical failure. “Everything I love…” said Professor Clark sorrowfully. All eyes turn to the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Space Telescope. There is so much more to learn! Very good science lectures are like being at a party listening to someone absolutely fascinating hold forth on their field of special interest; they’re like touching grass, except the grass is interstellar space. They’re delightful.

…there is no exclusively ‘white’ history of Australia—when we—First Nations people—have always been here. There is no ‘Black’ history of Australia in the last 240-plus years, either. We are each other’s shadows. To make sense of our shared history, we need to go back to the very beginning.

“For Rachel
Gwen Harwood
Poet
Bone Scan”

What the industry wants to do is revert to the mean—always.

It’s golden hour and the last sunlight is drenching the trees around our little treehouse. I just ran to the shops and on the way, had an overwhelming urge to listen to what is maybe the Alan Parsons Project’s weirdest song, certainly one that has stayed with me these forty years: Ammonia Avenue. Eric Woolfson wrote it after visiting the ICI petrochemical plant in Billingham, in the UK. It’s a hymn to science and progress, of sorts: “And who are we to criticize or scorn the things they do?” It might have been reading Lydia Kiesling’s excellent Mobility that brought it to mind, or driving past enormous industrial facilities dropping C back at college. But it was probably gazing into the heart of a nuclear reactor.

It’s a small General Atomics training reactor, the only one in the world operated by undergraduates. In the chemistry lobby where we met for a tour there is a small museum exhibit. This includes one of the hunting decoy ducks removed from the cooling pond in 2012 because the NRC found them unprofessional (“I tend to agree,” said our guide) and a chipped piece of orange Fiestaware beside the clicking Geiger counter it was setting off.

The reactor itself is in a small brick building behind the chemistry building. It looks like a garage. You enter via a hallway with a glass window looking into the reactor room, which looks like a weirdly industrial small indoor swimming pool. In the control room we met the operators on duty. There are the deadly serious panels from the 60s and 90s and 2020s tracking the reactor behavior, and there are the Homer Simpson mousepads and the joke tchotchkes like a switch labeled “Fission” and “Fusion.” Our tour guides and the operators all had jewel colored hair and facial piercings and badges with their pronouns beside the dosimeters above their hearts.

In the reactor hall we leaned on the railings and gazed thirty feet into the aluminium-lined pool. Long control rods descend into a squat dark cylinder with dozens of narrower cylinders running through it like wires through a cable: the graphite containment, the uranium fuel rods. The core. It’s cooled by a closed loop of water that runs into a heat exchanger where city water takes away the excess heat. If the system lost electricity, the control rods of boron silicate, a neutron poison, would drop into the core via gravity and stop the reaction. That’s the theory, anyway. The operators can also drop the control rods by hitting the big red SCRAM button.

Our tour guide turned off the lights and we saw a miracle, Cherenkov radiation, generated by neutrons moving faster than the speed of light in water and creating a visual equivalent to a sonic boom. It is the most beautiful blue you can possibly imagine, like Yves Klein blue but made of light. It’s like gazing into the unknowable quantum essence of the universe. And then the operators hit the scram button and the core lost criticality and the blue faded away.

That night I read Serhii Plokhy’s Atoms and Ashes, a followup to his excellent Chernobyl that looks at all six of the major nuclear accidents and their causes. I’m a Gen Xer still astonished to have outlived the Soviet Union. I grew up almost equally terrified of atoms for war and for peace. But the idea of powering our cities with magical hot rocks is arguably no worse than doing so with necromantically resurrected dead dinosaurs. How do you weigh six major atomic catastrophes against the ongoing invisible disaster of climate change? How do you reconcile all of that with the knowledge that nearly everyone who got us into this predicament was acting in good faith? I honestly have no idea.

Her family had been happy here, at least in her memory.

More than a few times she’d even prayed, selfishly, for The End to hold off until after she was dead and buried, so that she might be spared the pain of bearing witness to it.

Emotions and feelings were not impediments to reason; they were integral. “Reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were,” he wrote.

She’s a nightmare, top to bottom, but being mad at her is technically biphobia, so.

A woman who has reached forty-five in the heterocapitalist economy can arrive at the lesbian economy with a status close to adolescence. Bingo.

“There has been a break-in,” says Jeremy. “They need you to go down there and talk to the police.”

Everything went impossibly right. We spent months trying and failing to sort big kid’s passport and didn’t have it in hand until the very hour of our original flight, which we had to rebook at vast expense. Despite this I managed to overlap with dear friends in Paris and spend our first afternoon together at a cafe in the square. There was a fricken accordion player, it was ridiculous.

The fast trains to Narbonne were sold out so we rented a car in Paris instead, picked a village halfway there at random and ended up having one of the best meals of the trip in an absolutely gorgeous covered market in Souillac. We revisited the lovely abbeys at Fontfroide and Lagrasse and finally made it to Niaux Cave, which instantly joined Newgrange as one of my favorite places in the entire world.

Back in Paris we got Bastille Day free entry to the Louvre and I went to a concert in Sainte-Chapelle – Vivaldi and Pachelbel. Shivers up my spine. Then Jeremy and I rented bikes and accidentally crashed the victory rides around Paris with Team Rynkeby. Everything planned half-assedly and coming together at the last minute into delight. Amazing grace.

Our deepest problems are the inescapable side-effects of the FIAT system we live in, a system based on domination: our collapsing climate, the gaping wealth gap, discrimation against people of color, the exploitation of women. We need a generative way of relating to one another…

For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.

…every individual manifestation is only a reflection of Brahman, the absolute reality that underlies the phenomena of the world.

My whole life with the girls is telescoped into this moment—running away, running back. Fly, be free! I want to say. I want to say, Stay with me forever! Come to think of it, these are the two things I want to say to everyone I love most.