Speaker 1: Before my first daughter was born, before I could even
Speaker 1: imagine her existence, I had a dream that I was
Speaker 1: walking at the edge of the world. Everything around me
Speaker 1: was frozen, and the night sky hung low. A little
Speaker 1: girl appeared at my side and pointed into the tiny
Speaker 1: clusters of light. Misha, she said, Misha in Russian, Misha
Speaker 1: means little bear. And if you look up in the
Speaker 1: night sky, as the little girl instructed, you'll see ursa minor,
Speaker 1: the little bear with the North Star at the tip
Speaker 1: of its tail, a star that, no matter where you
Speaker 1: are in the world or who you are in the world,
Speaker 1: has always hung above, guiding us. Hi. Hi. My name
Speaker 1: is Julie Douglas, and this is the stuff of life.
Speaker 1: Each of us is connected to each other, relies on
Speaker 1: one another, gives and takes, consciously or unconsciously, weaving the
Speaker 1: web of support that it takes to make a society.
Speaker 1: In a sense, we're all just broken fragments of the whole,
Speaker 1: guiding ourselves back to each other. My name is ah As,
Speaker 1: I said. I'm originally from Turkey, but I have been
Speaker 1: living in this country for past four years and on
Speaker 1: my retired neurologist I'm Sully, I from Thailand, but I've
Speaker 1: lived in the US since nine three. My name is Kathy,
Speaker 1: and I actually lived in this area and worked for
Speaker 1: the federal government for thirty years. A Muslim, a Catholic,
Speaker 1: an elapsed Buddhist walk into a march. It sounds like
Speaker 1: the beginning of a joke, but it's Aisha, Suli and Kathy.
Speaker 1: We met them at the Women's March in d C,
Speaker 1: historic day when more than half a million people joined
Speaker 1: together in despair, anger, and hope about our collective existence.
Speaker 1: I hope people will begin to talk, both on a
Speaker 1: macro level and on a micro level. I think you
Speaker 1: have to do a lot of one on one um
Speaker 1: with your families and with your friends. And I think
Speaker 1: one of the issues that is happening today people don't
Speaker 1: talk to each other. They do want to yell at
Speaker 1: each other and scream at each other, and they want
Speaker 1: you to believe what they believe. And we all believe
Speaker 1: different things, and we all have the right to believe
Speaker 1: what we want to believe. That's what our country is
Speaker 1: all about. The trick is to find common ground, and
Speaker 1: quite literally, that's something we all have available to us
Speaker 1: right under our feet. Something we know as children but
Speaker 1: forget as adults. Young Ferdinand the Bowl, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: he doesn't want to be bucking heads at the other bulls. Instead,
Speaker 1: he'd rather lay under the trees and smell the flowers,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, that's what he wanted to do.
Speaker 1: His mother was concerned that he wasn't doing these things,
Speaker 1: but then she decides that Ferdinand is sort of content
Speaker 1: as he is, and she left him alone. That's Charles Burnbaum,
Speaker 1: the founder, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation,
Speaker 1: talking about an influential childhood book, Ferdinand the Bull. We
Speaker 1: met Charles on a sidewalk in Washington, d at the
Speaker 1: Women's March. He told us about his work at the
Speaker 1: Foundation and the way in which landscapes are democratizing and
Speaker 1: even healing. And I've looked back on this recently, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, thinking about this book and this idea of
Speaker 1: um smelling the flowers. What's so interesting to me is
Speaker 1: how often I am moving through a place and people
Speaker 1: aren't looking. They're on their phones, they're looking down. The
Speaker 1: mission of the Cultural Landscape Foundation is to connect people
Speaker 1: to places. By doing that, they teach people how to
Speaker 1: see what Charles calls the invisible hand of the landscape architect,
Speaker 1: or how to value nature and culture on equal footing.
Speaker 1: Escapes are incredibly personal. There's a reason why gardening in
Speaker 1: golf for America's favorite hobbies. I asked Charles what kind
Speaker 1: of landscape is his favorite, and he told me it's
Speaker 1: a kind of borrowed scenery. I think for me the
Speaker 1: idea of sky and guideline. And perhaps it's because I'm
Speaker 1: born and raised in New York City and that open
Speaker 1: space was a very precious commodity. Charles's memories of working
Speaker 1: alongside his grandparents became foundational to his understanding of time
Speaker 1: in history. I had grandparents who lived in New London, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: and they were My grandmother in particular, was a great gardener. Um.
Speaker 1: I remember the sweeps of Black Eyed Susan's and but
Speaker 1: the formative moment that I remember was being in the
Speaker 1: vegetable garden planting tomatoes with my grandfather and tilling the soil.
Speaker 1: And one of the things we unearthed was an old
Speaker 1: Moxie pop bottle. And you know, as a kid, I
Speaker 1: had never heard of moxipop. Um. I knew coke and pepsi,
Speaker 1: but not moxie. And this was a bottle that probably
Speaker 1: he had been in the ground for I don't know years,
Speaker 1: and it was the first time I think, as as
Speaker 1: is even a young person, to think about the idea
Speaker 1: that the landscape is embedded with stories and our challenges
Speaker 1: to unlock those and to discover those, and I just
Speaker 1: remember thinking how remarkable it was, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: I think as a young person, I even remember thinking about,
Speaker 1: you know, the dinosaurs and that that they too were
Speaker 1: um part of this palam sest, this layer and layer
Speaker 1: upon layer of landscape history that were tethered to the
Speaker 1: land through time. In history is most evident with something
Speaker 1: called witness trees. One of the things about wenz ape
Speaker 1: is that when you have something that is living like
Speaker 1: a tree, and the tree was there for an event,
Speaker 1: it becomes a portal or a life way. Yes. One
Speaker 1: of the most tangible witness trees, if you will, that
Speaker 1: I can think about is um the memorial at the
Speaker 1: World Trade Center in Manhattan. There is this incredible Bradford
Speaker 1: pear tree that survives that day and it was moved
Speaker 1: off site in a protected environment during the work that
Speaker 1: then ensued for a number of years, and it was
Speaker 1: brought back and there's a wonderfully beautifully simply designed railing
Speaker 1: around it, and literally people line up for upwards of
Speaker 1: thirty minutes, as I've witnessed, to be photographed in front
Speaker 1: of this tree and um. To have that tangible connection
Speaker 1: with something that survived that day, it's incredibly powerful. It's
Speaker 1: easy to see how landscapes, borrows, scenery, and public spaces
Speaker 1: can become bound up what Charles calls the messy, emotional,
Speaker 1: and provocative aspects of history. We've seen this recently with
Speaker 1: the executive order signed by President Trump that could reshape
Speaker 1: twenty four national monuments, including Bear's Ears Monument. You know,
Speaker 1: this is a landscape that is imbued with um, not
Speaker 1: just a treasure trove of resources. I mean, I've read
Speaker 1: that there's over a hundred thousand archaeological sites and wall
Speaker 1: etchings that are unrivaled, but it also has Um Navajo
Speaker 1: and Hopie Um and um. You know a great number
Speaker 1: of five I think it's five local tribes, native peoples
Speaker 1: who are you know, have their stories embedded in these places.
Speaker 1: You know, when you remove the politics that you have
Speaker 1: to begin with saying what is the significance of this place?
Speaker 1: And you know, a national monument doesn't have a although
Speaker 1: it is something that the president makes happen, it is
Speaker 1: based on an incredible amount of research and documentation. While
Speaker 1: documentation is incredibly important, there are less tangible facets to
Speaker 1: a landscape. You know, when we talk about our connectivity
Speaker 1: to a place, UM, there's emotional connectivity. UM. For example,
Speaker 1: that might be UM, you know we were talking about
Speaker 1: national monuments with Bear's ears. Uh you think about Stonewall
Speaker 1: National Monument in New York City that you know, you
Speaker 1: have the tavern, but the park that's across the streets,
Speaker 1: which is called Christopher Park, which is part of that
Speaker 1: National Monument designation, and it's a city park. Um, you
Speaker 1: know where these um riots or rallies played out over time. UM.
Speaker 1: That landscape boy rehabilitated by a landscape architect in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties named Phil Winslow who died of AIDS. And
Speaker 1: so for people that um, we're in New York. Then
Speaker 1: for people that make the pilgrimage who are UM, gay
Speaker 1: or transgender, UM, this could be this is a very
Speaker 1: powerful emotional connection when you stand there and you know,
Speaker 1: we talked about the visual connections the borrowed scenery. Imagine
Speaker 1: you know, being on the terrorists at built more the
Speaker 1: estate in North Carolina in Asheville, and if you didn't
Speaker 1: have that view, which is preserved, it would be a
Speaker 1: very different experience. But you know, I think the other
Speaker 1: thing that we don't talk about are the less tangible
Speaker 1: things we experience, Charles says. The National Register of Historic
Speaker 1: Places has something called the seven Aspects of integrity when
Speaker 1: evaluating a property for historic designation. The last two aspects
Speaker 1: are called feeling and association. How do we wrap our
Speaker 1: heads around that? Think about the sound of birds, you know,
Speaker 1: those are called biophonic sounds, um, rushing water on a
Speaker 1: grand scale Niagara falls, or it could be a cascade
Speaker 1: in your neighborhood park, or you know, if you live
Speaker 1: in the Lower South, it might be Spanish moss blowing
Speaker 1: in the wind. Those are geophonic sounds and those contribute
Speaker 1: to our experiences. And then there are man made sounds,
Speaker 1: and some of those can be happy or or not
Speaker 1: so happy sounds. I mean, think about going to a
Speaker 1: ball game and the sound of a bat making contact
Speaker 1: with a ball, that cracking sound, and the rush that
Speaker 1: you have when you hear that, or the roar of
Speaker 1: the crowd, is that they give us pleasure, but we
Speaker 1: may not be aware of them. And I think that's
Speaker 1: all part of experience a landscape are those emotional, visual,
Speaker 1: and sensory sounds and experiences that we have. So with
Speaker 1: all that's tangible and intangible, I asked Charles what it
Speaker 1: means to be a good steward of the land. There's
Speaker 1: there's two different kinds of stewardship that happens. There's stewardship
Speaker 1: that happens in your heart, which is basically I mean
Speaker 1: if you own a resource or you know, it's almost
Speaker 1: like being a parent. You know, how will you care
Speaker 1: for this place? Um? Will you manage change in a
Speaker 1: way that is sensitive to these systems that we both
Speaker 1: have alluded to. And the systems can be cultural life ways,
Speaker 1: they can be at the hand of a designer, They
Speaker 1: can be um ecology and all of its manifestations, UM
Speaker 1: watershed um you know insect and bird populations, you know
Speaker 1: the use of um natives and not exotics. All of
Speaker 1: that is stewardship. But the stewardship is also acting with knowledge.
Speaker 1: And this knowledge can be known or just waiting to
Speaker 1: be unearthed, which all comes down to those Moxie bottles
Speaker 1: of stories hidden in the land. How do we begin
Speaker 1: to really unlock these stories and to make people inquisitive,
Speaker 1: invite them to fall into that portal and um, and
Speaker 1: to take the time to do it, to open their heart,
Speaker 1: to open their eyes, to open their ears. An excerpt
Speaker 1: from When I'm Among the Trees by Mary Oliver. When
Speaker 1: I am among the tree, especially the willows and the
Speaker 1: honey locust, especially the beach, the oaks, and the pines,
Speaker 1: they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost
Speaker 1: say that they saved me. And daily around me the
Speaker 1: trees stir in their leaves and call out, stay awhile
Speaker 1: the light flows from their branches, and they call me again.
Speaker 1: It's simple, they say, you too, have come into the
Speaker 1: world to go easy, to be filled with light, and
Speaker 1: to shine part of the Before my first daughter was born,
Speaker 1: before I could even imagine her existence, I had a
Speaker 1: dream that I was walking at the edge of the world.
Speaker 1: Everything around me was frozen and the night sky hung low.
Speaker 1: A little girl appeared at my side and pointed into
Speaker 1: tiny clusters of light. Misha, Misha, she insisted. In Hebrew.
Speaker 1: Misha is a name that can also mean a question.
Speaker 1: The question, who is like God? Perhaps no one or
Speaker 1: perhaps all of us. Imagine if you inherited a trunk
Speaker 1: from your ancestors that's full of heirlooms, and the trunk
Speaker 1: has a set size, so you won't get heirlooms from
Speaker 1: everybody because you have a lot, a lot of ancestors.
Speaker 1: But you can imagine you can kind of rifle through
Speaker 1: there and pick up various pieces, uh, and they'll represent
Speaker 1: different ancestral lines for you. My name is Jake Burns,
Speaker 1: and I'm a manager of population Genomics at Ancestry DNA,
Speaker 1: and I would describe having spent my career examining DNA
Speaker 1: to understand sort of how the evolutionary process works at
Speaker 1: a fundamental level, how does it change your DNA over time.
Speaker 1: Jake had always been steeped in mathematics and biology, but
Speaker 1: when he learned that with DNA he could dive into
Speaker 1: the past I nearly any organism and discover something hidden
Speaker 1: about their histories, he was hooked. And the idea is,
Speaker 1: over time, DNA through the copying process, it isn't perfect
Speaker 1: when you pass it on generation to generations, so you
Speaker 1: acquire mutations and you can actually think of those mutations
Speaker 1: as a ticking clock, and each mutation is a tick
Speaker 1: um because they're roughly evenly spaced through time. You can
Speaker 1: start to date various events in time by looking at
Speaker 1: kind of the number of mutations or differences that separate
Speaker 1: two different organisms. Combine those molecular clocks with that trunk
Speaker 1: from your ancestors, and a fuller picture of the United
Speaker 1: States unfolds. The US is you know, I think particularly
Speaker 1: exceptional in having drawn immigrant populations from all over the
Speaker 1: world in very recent time, in the last you know,
Speaker 1: four or five years kind of since the birth of
Speaker 1: the country. And um that you know, influx of culture, language, worldview,
Speaker 1: and DNA from around the world creates this great mixture
Speaker 1: within the US. What's exciting from genetics point of view is, UH,
Speaker 1: there are enough subtle differences between these different groups that
Speaker 1: we can you know, attempt to assign kind of originating
Speaker 1: uh points in time and space UH and and kind
Speaker 1: of tell this very complicated story of how people have
Speaker 1: arrived and assimilated in some cases or not in other cases,
Speaker 1: uh into the broader population within the US. Point of
Speaker 1: origination arrival simulation. These words stick out because they underscore
Speaker 1: a deeply entrenched pattern in humans, the idea that our
Speaker 1: genes have criss crossed the globe and that we're actually
Speaker 1: far more connected to one another than we know. But
Speaker 1: to truly understand, we're going to need some eminem's in
Speaker 1: a few jars. You imagine, uh, a giant glass bowl
Speaker 1: and you fill it with eminem's. But imagine that we
Speaker 1: have thousands and thousands of eminem's in this giant bowl,
Speaker 1: and imagine that they are hundreds of different colors. Now
Speaker 1: we can imagine this bowl kind of represents one generation
Speaker 1: of people in history, where each eminem is a person
Speaker 1: and their colors tell you something about kind of the
Speaker 1: DNA that they carry. Now imagine that, Uh, to construct
Speaker 1: a new generation, we're going to sort of take a
Speaker 1: sample from that first bowl and move it into a
Speaker 1: second bowl. And that's how we're going to create a
Speaker 1: new generation. When you do your sampling in a in
Speaker 1: a sort of typical population that isn't undergoing a bottleneck,
Speaker 1: you would imagine kind of individually picking out one eminem
Speaker 1: at a time and maybe then dropping it in the
Speaker 1: new bowl and replacing it in the original bowl. So
Speaker 1: what you end up within the second bowl if you
Speaker 1: sample again thousands of em and m's into the second
Speaker 1: bowl is roughly the same representation of colors and kind
Speaker 1: of roughly the same proportions of colors in the second bowl.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of a typical population generation. This is
Speaker 1: a stable population of eminem's pouring in and out day
Speaker 1: after day. But what if something disrupts it, something catastrophic,
Speaker 1: creating a bottleneck. The hand of God, so to speak,
Speaker 1: digging into the bowl, simply reaching that big, that big
Speaker 1: first bowl with a hand and select a single handful
Speaker 1: of eminem's and throw them into the new bowl, and
Speaker 1: then imagine that that little handful expanded over time. That
Speaker 1: handful effectively represents the genetic bottleneck, where you've taken a
Speaker 1: very small sample of the original population in the original diversity,
Speaker 1: and you've seated a new population. Which you can imagine
Speaker 1: happens is in that small handful, you've got probably no
Speaker 1: representatives of some colors, and in some cases you may
Speaker 1: have gotten way more eminem's of a particular color than
Speaker 1: you would expect by chance. We humans take our position
Speaker 1: in the food chain of life for granted, but there
Speaker 1: have been moments in time like around fifty to sixty
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, when humans were far from dominating the world.
Speaker 1: In fact, the population had whittled down significantly to a bottleneck.
Speaker 1: The handful of Eminem's plut from the jar, so to speak,
Speaker 1: and from this handful we are all descended. To see
Speaker 1: this idea illustrated in a mathematical constellation, Jake and his
Speaker 1: team constructed a network of seven hundred thousand ancestry dot
Speaker 1: com customers. Here's what they found. And if you imagine
Speaker 1: each one uh as a point in a large graph,
Speaker 1: we'll draw an edge between any pair of individuals if
Speaker 1: they share enough genetic material to be fairly recently related.
Speaker 1: What was surprising is that almost that entire graph is
Speaker 1: very highly connected. So among those seven hundred thousand people,
Speaker 1: we had to draw over five hundred million lines to
Speaker 1: connect them all, and yet we still gather into mental tribes.
Speaker 1: It's a tough time, right. Um. You know, there's a
Speaker 1: I think a wave of nationalism across the world, but
Speaker 1: in response also to the dangers of globalism. Right, So
Speaker 1: it's you know, that's a very tough conversation. I think, Um,
Speaker 1: each person has to sort of um figure out where
Speaker 1: they fall. Um. But I think genetics and family history
Speaker 1: have surprisingly a little part to play in that story.
Speaker 1: One of the most important take home messages is is
Speaker 1: exactly this connectivity of of humanity UM. You know, we
Speaker 1: have a tremendous tendency on the surface to um to
Speaker 1: be tribal, right, to support those in our community are
Speaker 1: close community. And part of the way we kind of
Speaker 1: create this social bond is by treating those who are
Speaker 1: next door, just across the street or across the political
Speaker 1: boundary as the enemy. And you know, one of the
Speaker 1: really powerful things about what we see in genetic data is,
Speaker 1: you know, those close neighbors typically are very close relatives
Speaker 1: of yours uh in fairly recent history. And so you know,
Speaker 1: it might be very optimistic that I have high hopes
Speaker 1: for sort of the transformational power of getting this information
Speaker 1: in a broader audience's hands where they can UM kind
Speaker 1: of sit back and sort of recognize how closely related
Speaker 1: we all are. Humans are a collection of genes scattered
Speaker 1: across time as we know it on Earth. But we
Speaker 1: owe our true beginnings to the tumble weed of cosmic matter,
Speaker 1: matter that originated with time itself. The chemical elements that
Speaker 1: we see in the mirror in the Morn, England. We
Speaker 1: look at ourselves. So those were all atoms that were
Speaker 1: inside stars hundreds of millions of years ago to billions
Speaker 1: of years ago. And so this is a pretty astonishing
Speaker 1: story just to begin with about the atoms. We're all
Speaker 1: connected in a very deep way, and yet we all
Speaker 1: forget that. I'm John Mather. I work at NASA Goddard
Speaker 1: Space Flight Center, and I'm the senior project scientist for
Speaker 1: the James web Space Telescope. John's work has helped confirmed
Speaker 1: the Big Bang theory the very moment time began when
Speaker 1: our universe came into existence, and he's done this with
Speaker 1: extraordinary accuracy. John leads the team for the James Webb
Speaker 1: Space Telescope, telescope designed to peer far back into time.
Speaker 1: Committee was formed, of course, to write a report to
Speaker 1: say what do we do next, and they said, please
Speaker 1: build us an even bigger, more powerful telescope that could
Speaker 1: see further back in time to see those first galaxies growing.
Speaker 1: That's what's become the James Web Space Telescope. And this way,
Speaker 1: the telescope acts as night vision goggles, observing longer infrared wavelengths.
Speaker 1: This allowed scientists to see things that had never been
Speaker 1: detected before, the locations of thousands of other planets orbiting
Speaker 1: other stars with conditions that could be similar to Earth
Speaker 1: have been isolated. We'd like to find the one that's
Speaker 1: just just the right temperature, the right size, has the
Speaker 1: right amount of gravity, the roughly the right chemistry to
Speaker 1: be like home. This kind of curiosity was a feature
Speaker 1: of John's childhood. I grew up in very rural northern
Speaker 1: New Jersey, and so it was really country and really
Speaker 1: far away from town, and it was dark at night
Speaker 1: and you could see the stars. It was a really
Speaker 1: interesting place scientifically to grow up because geology was happening
Speaker 1: all around. This is uh where the Appelachians cut across Jersey,
Speaker 1: and so the glaciers had come across and brought in
Speaker 1: all kinds of interesting stones and rocks, and there were
Speaker 1: fossils lying by the road. We went down to the
Speaker 1: Museum and Natural History in New York City and we
Speaker 1: saw the planetarium show, and we saw the bones displayed
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs, and the and the evolution displays. You can
Speaker 1: see how the fish turned into bigger fish and got
Speaker 1: more complicated over the zillions of years. So anyway, it
Speaker 1: was a fascinating time to be a kid, just having
Speaker 1: a sense of everything was open to be discovered, and
Speaker 1: everything was fascinating. But what draws John the most are
Speaker 1: the mysteries embedded in the stars. Immediately, I'm connected with
Speaker 1: the story that we tell about where did we come from?
Speaker 1: How did we get here? Um? And I know from
Speaker 1: studying and thinking about it that the the universe is
Speaker 1: truly immense and gigantic, and then the stars are really
Speaker 1: far away. And then the part that we can get
Speaker 1: from personal experiences so tiny by coming Earth and you know, um,
Speaker 1: human lifespans about a hundred years, and that's about as
Speaker 1: much as we can remember. We talked to our grandparents,
Speaker 1: and that's about as far back as anybody remembers in person.
Speaker 1: And then we go on to say, well, we sidis
Speaker 1: have figured out what's happened over billions of years, and
Speaker 1: it's way beyond personal experience, but it's still mysterious and wonderful.
Speaker 1: And so I say, what a miraculous thing could be
Speaker 1: appreciative of? Say, well, out of this enormous universe, here
Speaker 1: we are looking up at the great mysteries of the
Speaker 1: sky and the mysteries of our own history. So what
Speaker 1: does all of this look like to John who's looked
Speaker 1: deep into space and time through the telescope, returning again
Speaker 1: and again home to Earth. Because the Earth special even
Speaker 1: in the Solar System, we're the only ones that have
Speaker 1: liquid ocean on the surface. We have continents and oceans,
Speaker 1: just enough water to fill up the ocean, but not
Speaker 1: all the way over the top of the mountain. So um,
Speaker 1: we can imagine that life on another planet that had
Speaker 1: water might exist, but without continents, I wouldn't have people.
Speaker 1: Virtually all the astronauts said look back at the Earth,
Speaker 1: either from the space station or from the Apollo. They
Speaker 1: all report some kind of mystic experience about this. Seeing
Speaker 1: the Earth as small and fragile and as our only home.
Speaker 1: People come back realizing that our Earth is very special.
Speaker 1: We might need to protect it as well as we can,
Speaker 1: both from natural disasters and from the kinds of disasters
Speaker 1: that we could cause for ourselves, so we might be
Speaker 1: the only ones for long, long distance around. For chilling
Speaker 1: all of this heavy stuff is actually very grounding. It
Speaker 1: does give you a sense of humility and awe at
Speaker 1: the power of creation. Whatever creation story we may have
Speaker 1: us as no matter how you tell it, it's astonishing,
Speaker 1: so um gratitude for for the opportunity to be here. UM.
Speaker 1: I think Jim Lovell, astronaut who went to the moon
Speaker 1: uh said basically, UM, this is heaven right here. When
Speaker 1: you're born, you are in heaven. I think this is
Speaker 1: a wonderful perspective to think about. Um, this is a
Speaker 1: very special spot, a special spot that we all somehow
Speaker 1: made it too. Before my first daughter was born, before
Speaker 1: I could even imagine her existence, I had a dream
Speaker 1: that I was walking at the edge of the world.
Speaker 1: Everything around me was frozen, and the night sky hung low.
Speaker 1: A little girl appeared at my side, and she pointed
Speaker 1: into tiny clusters of light Misha. A year later, my daughter,
Speaker 1: Sayed was born. She grew strong, she pulled sticks across
Speaker 1: the dirt, and she learned the names of the stars.
Speaker 1: Seven years later I woke up. I was thirty six
Speaker 1: weeks pregnant, and I knew something was wrong. Soon I
Speaker 1: bore a second child, a girl who fought her way
Speaker 1: into the world. We named her Sky, and one spring day,
Speaker 1: her sister said whispered to her, I love you, Sky.
Speaker 1: I wished on the North Star for you. If you
Speaker 1: were to connect dots from Sky to each person responsible
Speaker 1: for her existence. Today, you would see a kind of
Speaker 1: infinity spiraling out from her, moving back and forth through time.
Speaker 1: The very same is true for each of us. That
Speaker 1: we are separate from everyone and everything around us is
Speaker 1: a myth. We see water from a faucet and think
Speaker 1: of it as distinctly ours. Food is delivered from the
Speaker 1: ground to our shelves and it becomes ours. We see
Speaker 1: our hand outstretched in front of us, and we think
Speaker 1: that is me. But the fact is the constituent parts
Speaker 1: of our body were ripped from the mesh of the universe,
Speaker 1: molecule by molecule. Even the oxygen we breathe is on
Speaker 1: loan from every breath of every human being who has
Speaker 1: ever lived, and whose breath rippled out into the atmosphere
Speaker 1: before us. We are wired together by forces seen and unseen.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining forces with us this season. We'll
Speaker 1: be back soon for season three. Many thanks to Jake
Speaker 1: Byurne's at ancestry DNA for helping us to better understand
Speaker 1: that we're all from the same pond. Ancestry dot Com
Speaker 1: provided several kits for staff, and we are all now
Speaker 1: discovering thousands of third and fourth cousins we never knew
Speaker 1: we had. And thank you to Charles Burnbaum of the
Speaker 1: Cultural Landscape Foundation, a foundation which can be found at
Speaker 1: t c LF dot org is accepting nominations for at
Speaker 1: risk landscapes. And finally, thank you to Nobel Laurea John
Speaker 1: c Mother of NASA, for sharing personal stories of his
Speaker 1: youth and how those stories led him to look further
Speaker 1: into the universe and by extension, give all of us
Speaker 1: a view into the cosmos. The Stuff of Life is
Speaker 1: written and executive produced by me and Julie Douglas and
Speaker 1: co produced by Noel Brown. Editorial oversight is provided by
Speaker 1: contributing producer Dylan Fagan and Head of Production Jerry Rowland.
Speaker 1: Original music is by Noel Brown. The song Cylinder five
Speaker 1: is by Chris Sabriovsky. You can find more of his
Speaker 1: music at Chris Sabriovsky dot com. This episode also featured
Speaker 1: music by Dylan Fagan, Tristan McNeil and Aaron Grubbs also
Speaker 1: included our songs by Breathers. Find more of their work
Speaker 1: at Breathers dot band camp dot com. And you can
Speaker 1: find the Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter, and
Speaker 1: you can email at the Stuff of Life at House
Speaker 1: of Works dot com MHM