Author’s Note: This is a revision of an assignment I was asked to do as part of an essay-writing course that I took a few years ago. We were supposed to use specific details, physical and emotional, to describe a place we held mixed feelings for. It took me a while to decide upon the topic I eventually ended up writing, but looking back at this essay, the destination was worth it. If you read, please review and let me know what you think. This is one of my favorite pieces I’ve written, and I’m eager to know how others feel about it.

Miraculous Place

“I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

—Robert Frost, “Birches”

The earth as it is viewed from the moon is a sight so remarkable that one who sees it will never be the same again. It is a blue and green globe of warming light, about three or four times the size of the moon seen from Earth, suspended in the void that is outer space. Far off in the distance, the stars twinkle fiercely, slowly burning off all of their energy. I look at them and am caught up in their intense beauty, the way that they seem to be scattered randomly across the sky like the lights on a Christmas tree. I smile as I think that every one of those stars is a sun of its own, a sun whose system might host habitable planets where life has already arisen, or is about to. Life that still has a chance to make the right choice. Life that still has the choice to live in peace and harmony.

But where there is life, there are choices badly made. No one can be sure that any other life should fare better than we humans have. I shudder, not from the cold, but from the thought that every planet that sees life will inevitably make fatal mistakes, eventually encountering death and the horrors that accompany it. It is all I can do to hope that somewhere, one species on one planet will break free and help the rest of us do the same.

I turn around to look back at the earth, which my gaze is inexorably drawn to. Now it looks like a large blue-green marbled candy, gently revolving through space, coated with banks of fluffy white clouds. I watch the dusk line creep slowly westward across the glowing sphere. Maine has just gone to bed, and China is just now beginning to wake up. The oceans are of the bluest blue, as blue as the sky appears to be when I stand at home and look up on a clear summer day. But neither the seas nor the skies appear blue at home most of the time. The oceans are in fact of a darker, murky hue in most places, and not truly blue anymore. The skies have resisted this plague longer, but still suffer from the consequences of man. They, too, are slowly darkening, thickened by smog and pollution.

My gaze wanders away from the blue of Earth’s oceans, and I turn instead towards the green of the continents. They, too, seem to have a special kind of clarity, a depth that makes the color come alive in them, transforming the continents into a mass of shimmering green that appears lighted from within. It is as though the world is transparent, and someone has turned on a powerful light at the very core. This sight does much to restore me, until I think of how it would look if I could jump forward in time many years and see the effects of deforestation. The globe of that time would not shine so bright a green.

By looking at the Earth from such a distance, it is impossible to tell that it is inhabited at all. From this far away, all signs of human existence become invisible, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, and even then, it has to be something monumental that you’re searching out, like the Great Wall of China. If someone from another solar system, even one close to ours, gazed into the night sky, we would not be there to them as more than a dot of light, if that. Even from Pluto, a planet within our own solar system, we would appear as an insignificant speck, and the sun would be just another star. For a brief moment, I feel dwarfed by the immensity of the universe. And yet, in its immensity, the universe may very well be empty. We can fantasize or dread the idea of other creatures out there as much as we like, but so far, we haven’t found any. Earth’s got to be treated as the one chance that life gets, because we don’t really know what lies beyond. We could be humanity’s only shot. We could be all alone. I realize that when you look at everything, we’re just a small planet in an average solar system with a medium-sized sun, but it seems that we must be more than that, that our lives must have some meaning, some importance. No one ever stops to think that we might be important simply because we’re all that we’ve got.

As I take a look around, I see more stars, standing out like diamonds in the velvet fabric of the sky. The sun is off to one side, a blazing ball of intense yellow fire that I can’t look at directly. Although the sky is completely black aside from these pinpricks of light, my shadow can be seen on the ground next to me. It appears bleak and sharp, with no atmosphere to hinder it. The ground is a pale off-white, and covered in much dust. I take a step, bouncing slightly in the one-sixth gravity, and survey my footprints. They will be here for ages to come, finally eroded away by small meteor strikes, but appearing new until then, as there is no wind to disturb them.

The moon dust that my steps kicked up settles, and as I watch it fall down slowly, I am reminded of where I really am, somewhere so far away from the comforts of home. The world seems small, as though I could reach out and cup it in my hands. It is amazing, how unremarkable it seems. And yet, it holds so much importance, so much meaning, that I am appalled to think of it as small. I suppose that you’ve just got to be able to get away from Earth and take a good look back to really realize what it is you’re missing. At home, none of this seems particularly incredible at all. We take our planet for granted, and not just in terms of the natural resources that it gives us and that we use every day. A lot of times, it can be easy to forget how much life there is on our comparatively insignificant ball of rock and metal revolving through space. If something should happen to all that life—how terrible!

Here, I find that I can finally understand in full what it means to say, “This means the world to me.” Our world is so precious, and it means so much, even though we don’t usually realize it. Some people put a lot of time into thinking about the possibilities of colonizing other planets, possibly even ones outside our solar system. But at the moment, Earth is what we have, and all that we will get for a long while. Earth is where we make our stand. Yes, somewhere under that cloak of clouds, someone is sad, someone is in need of help that will not come, and someone is probably being hurt or killed for no apparent reason. But someone is making another person happy, and someone is laughing for joy, and someone sits full of hope, waiting for a better day to come, and the sun to rise on a new world.