In 1977, when the Voyagers were launched, one of these spacecraft carried

the Interstellar Record, a hoped-for link between earth and space that is filled with the sounds and images of the world around us. It carries parts of our lives all the way out to the great Forever. It is destined to travel out of our vast solar system, out to the far, unexplored regions of space in hopes that somewhere, millions of years from now, someone will find it like a note sealed in a bottle carrying our history across the black ocean of space. This message is intended for the year 8,000,000.

         One greeting onboard from Western India says: “Greetings from a human being of the Earth. Please contact.” Another, from Eastern China, but resembling one that could have been sent by my own Chickasaw people, says: “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.”

         . . . .

         A small and perfect world is traveling there, with psalms journeying past Saturn’s icy rings, all our treasured life flying through darkness, going its way along through the universe. There is the recorded snapping of fire, the song of a river traveling the continent, the living wind passing through dry grasses, all the world that burns and pulses around us, even the comforting sound of a heartbeat taking us back to the first red house of our mothers’ bodies, all that, floating through the universe.

         . . . .

         We have sent a message that states what we most value here on earth: respect for all life and ways. It is a sealed world, a seed of what we may become. What an amazing document is flying above the clouds, holding Utopia. It is more magical and heavy with meaning than the cave paintings of Lascaux, more wise than the language of any holy book. These are images that could sustain us through any cold season of ice or hatred or pain.

         . . . .

         There is so much hope that it takes us away from the dark times of horror we live in, a time when the most cruel aspects of our natures have been revealed to us in regions of earth named Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai, and Rwanda, a time when televised death is the primary amusement of our children, when our children are killing one another on the streets.

         At second glance, this vision for a new civilization, by its very presence, shows us what is wrong with our world. Defining Utopia, we see what we could be now, on earth, at this time, and next to the images of a better world, that which is absent begins to cry out. The underside of our lives grows in proportion to what is denied. The darkness is made darker by the record of light. A screaming silence falls between the stars of space. Held inside that silence are the sounds of gunfire, the wailings of grief and hunger, the last, extinct song of a bird. The damned river goes dry, along with its valleys. Illnesses that plague our bodies live in this crack of absence. The broken link between us and the rest of our world grows too large, and the material of nightmares grows deeper while the promises for peace and equality are empty, are merely dreams without reality.

         . . . .

         In so many ways, the underside of our lives is here. Even the metals used in the record tell a story about the spoils of inner earth, the laborers in the hot minds. Their sweat is in that record, hurtling away from our own galaxy.

         . . . .

         But still, this innocent reaching out is a form of ceremony, as if the Voyager were a sacred space, a ritual enclosure that contains our dreaming the way a cathedral holds the bones of saints.

         The people of earth are reaching out. We are having a collective vision. Like young women and men on a vision quest, we seek a way to live out the peace of the vision we have sent to the world of stars. We want to live as if there is no other place, as if we will always be here. We want to live with devotion to the world of waters and the universe of life that dwells above our thin roofs.