Filed under: Editorial | Tagged: Lemtrada, MS, Multiple Sclerosis, Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month, National MS Society, Rebecca Hitt, Walk MS | Leave a comment »
MS Awareness Month 2018: Blessings and Monsters
Puppies and Magic
Joel went outside the other morning with Rebecca, and encountered a creature he’d not met before right there in his backyard.
It was much smaller than Joel and walking around, and he decided he needed to go meet it.
He took a few steps toward it, and it took a few steps away. He took a few steps faster, and it ran faster away.
Joel started started running toward it, and IT LEFT THE GROUND! This creature was suddenly IN MIDAIR, with nothing underneath it! JUST IN THE AIR! With no ground under it! It just took off as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do! Not on the ground! In the air!
Joel turned back to Rebecca with this “Did you see that!?!?” look on his face, and then stared, dumbfounded, at the thing until it was gone.
He’s never going to understand, the way we do, concepts like gravity and lift and drag and airfoils and aerodynamics and the low-density of hollow bones.
But he’ll get older and kind of figure out that the world works in consistent ways, and everything he witnesses generally meshes with those consistent rules and there’s not really any magic.
But right now, there is.
And, really, it’s not a bad perspective to have.
Filed under: Editorial, God | Tagged: Dog, Joel, Magic, Puppy | Leave a comment »
More Rocket in the Rocket City
Filed under: Editorial, huntsville, space | Tagged: huntsville, intertank, Marshall Space Flight Center, MSFC, NASA, Pegasus, rockets, SLS, Space Launch System | Leave a comment »
Godspeed, John Young
I was born about a week after the end of the Apollo era. John Young and Bob Crippen were the first US astronauts to fly in my lifetime, and by then I was old enough to be excited about it. To me, they were like real-life Captain Kirks. It was not until decades later that I realized he had walked also on the moon, but even then it impressed me less than flying that first space shuttle into the heavens.
Filed under: Editorial, space, Writing | Tagged: Bold They Rise, Homesteading Space, john young, NASA, space shuttle | Leave a comment »
At The Beginning…
Three years ago today, Rebecca and I were at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for the first launch of NASA’s Orion Spacecraft. It was, to put it lightly, an incredible experience. I’d returned to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and joined NASA’s Space Launch System two years earlier that week, but I’d been following Orion for far longer than that, so it was overwhelming finally seeing it fly.
Sunday marked five years that I’ve been part of the SLS program, and they’ve been the most incredible of my career. I’m incredibly blessed to be here – I was talking to a friend, recently, about how, when I was in early high school, this is basically where I’d dreamed of being, that I’d abandoned that dream before college, but had somehow halfway-accidentally ended up where I’d wanted to be in the beginning. The irony is, if I’d stuck with my initial dream, there’s a good chance I would have ended up somewhere else.
All that to say, I’ve watched the SLS team pour themselves into this work, and we’re now seeing it pay off in a very real and very big way as the rocket takes shape. It is phenomenal to see the things they’ve already built, and to watch those massive pieces come together. But the real payoff – I was about to say the real payoff will be finally seeing in launch in two years, but, while that will be incredible, it’s not really true. The real payoff will be seeing what is accomplished when this rocket starts flying, and seeing a generation inspired as humanity reaches farther than ever before.
Filed under: Editorial, space, Uncategorized | Tagged: Mars, Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA, orion, SLS, Space Launch System | 2 Comments »
“The University is Respected, But Ole Miss Is Loved”
This was in my Facebook feed this morning:
I’ve had the opportunity to go some amazing places and see some awesome things supporting NASA’s Space Launch System, but getting to take my rocket back “home” to Ole Miss will always be a favorite.
For the first six years after college, when I was still working in newspapers, it looked like I was on track to eventually accomplish the career dreams I had when I was a print journalism major there.
In my mind, it’s a far, far greater testimony to how well my Ole Miss journalism prepared me to see now how far it’s carried me from anywhere I’d ever dreamed.
It’s been a little while since I’ve been published in a newspaper or magazine, but I’m still proud of my The University of Mississippi – Ole Miss j-school education, and grateful to folks like Samir A. Husni, Joe Atkins, Robin Street and Judy Crump for the foundation they gave me.
Filed under: Editorial, space | Tagged: journalism, NASA, Ole Miss, SLS, University of Mississippi | Leave a comment »
Review: “The Master’s Mind” by Lance Hahn
There is a line, toward the end of Lance Hahn’s “The Master’s Mind,” that sums up the heart of the book in both its depth and simplicity: “Repent doesn’t only mean to turn away to be change one’s mind and start agreeing with God.”
For those who perceive Christianity as a religion fueled largely by “Thou Shalt Nots” – whether believer or otherwise – this book will be revelatory. Its focus, indeed, is not even on “Thou Shalts.” Rather, it is concerned much less with the things that a person refrain from doing or the things they must do than it is concerned with how a person should be thinking about the world, or, more accurately, about God.
There is today a modern resurgence of the philosophy of Stoicism, teaching that one’s world is influenced by nothing so much as by how one perceives it, and this book provides a Christian angle on that approach –– there is nothing that shapes one’s world so much as God, and one’s experience of that world is driven by how you understand Him. Life becomes simpler and more rewarding the more that understanding and appreciation is kept in place.
Hahn builds his case incrementally, beginning with establishing an understanding of the world around us – including the challenges therein – before culminating in a guide to finding rest in that chaos.
An accessible and engaging read, “The Master’s Mind” is a beneficial revelation or reminder to anyone seeking peace in an overwhelming world.
(Disclosure: I was provided a review copy of “The Master’s Mind” by Handlebar Marketing.)
Filed under: Entertainment, God, Reviews | Tagged: Lance Hahn, Stoicism, The Master's Mind | Leave a comment »