Life as a Rocket Ship

Why anyone would want to and why nobody has is well beyond me.
Quick, now. Think of the thing you want most in the world. Ok now, DON’T concentrate on it. In fact now try not to think of it. I bet you can’t. Ha! Exactly. That is what I thought. Me either.

So how do I do it? They say that you can’t get what you want when you focus on it, and you can’t often get what you want if you don’t know what it is, and then others say that once you get what you want you may discover that you don’t want it after all… Sadly, at one time or another all those anonymous pseudo- sages have been correct. At least as far as my life is concerned.

So maybe it is not in my cards to have some of the most basic things in life; was I destined (or have I manifested a reality) to live alone. In my experience it seems so remote, so distant, impossible and unlikely. The few sparks that have lit up my life were short-lived, twinkling lights and seem more like glimmers from stars long dead than realities. And in fact that is what they are. The light that I see is just what is left. As it has traveled so far through time that the light is all that is left. But unlike the stars in the sky, there are only a spare few. Leaving the rest of the night sky dark, blank and dark. Far more comets than stars and certainly no planets. Ok, well one planet… the gravitational pull of that one still lingers and often operates more like a black hole sucking everything into its vacuous darkness.

I once said I wanted to be … I don’t want to be the sun in someone else's sky. Nor do I want to be a moon simply reflecting back on another, trapped in a monotonous orbital path forever circling. I want my light to shine and to be shone upon; I want my orbital path to be intertwined, but not dictated by another's.

As far back as 2006, when I first wrote about this concept I have felt drawn to this image of the “mutual orbit… the Binary star.”

“I want to find my celestial body a new relation. A mutual orbit. And form an ellipse. … I am concerned now both with metaphysics and my own ability to love and to be loved, to release and let the powers of nature work. I want to be a binary star, want to have and orbit around my companion star.
Interminable.
A sun burns brightly and shines on all it sees. It provides light, warmth and life. It is essential. A moon, as far as we know, is dark and lifeless. As far as a comparison, this is entirely unfair, because this is not in fact true about any man. …The moon provides no light. It only reflects the glory of the sun. The moon is miraculous… but I want a binary star.” The Orbit, Sierra Melcher. 8.27.06

And as I look around in the world on every continent across cultural and age boundaries, across religious and linguistic groups, people have managed to find their own celestial relationship… whether it be sun and moon, stars in the sky, comets passing or bodies united through space and time; they have each managed to find their orbit.

Yet, I remain without such consistency. I have been living my life more like a rocket ship darting to and from distant and remote regions of the universe seeing all the wonders of the world, bearing witness to the glories of God and space as they exist in people and nature. And I have docked several times to gather supplies, so to speak, but never have I rested long enough to develop a gravitational pull of any kind. And there has, up to this point, been no space in my ship for others. Will I be a rocket man, or is there a more intimate, less glorious path I can travel.
Will the allure of the distant reaches of the world lose their appeal, will the basic forces of nature ever catch up with me, or will I make them chase me into old age when the decisions I never made will be made for me?
Is it possible to be two people? Is it possible to live life to the fullest without giving up on something?