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"One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things." — John Burroughs
Stray from the ordinary this holiday season. Dare to be different.
How about treating yourself and your family this Christmas to a show at the Griffith Park Observatory on the south slope of a hill overlooking the LAbasin? Prepare to be amazed at the superb and deeply engaging storytelling of how we came to be and how we are essentially stardust. $93 million renovation, done over four years, is worth every penny. renovated observatory opened last year and continues to draw crowds. Before it closed for renovation five years ago, some 70 million people had passed through its heavy iron doors. Colonel Griffith must be smiling in heaven. His goal is being met long after he passed on to the heavens he loved so much.Of particular interest is the show Centered in the Universe in the Observatory’s Oschin Planetarium a must-see for those seeking to understand life, the universe and his place in it. It can help put things in perspective and help us see how tiny and insignificant our worries are. It can teach us to rise above the little things.
Admission rates are reasonable. Go to the observatory’s website http://www.griffithobs.org for more details.
Why look heavenward at the tailend of the year? Now is a good time to take stock of a dramatic year about to be filed away in some cosmic memory bank. Endings contain the seeds of beginnings.
Years ago when my daughter was very young, I had a conversation with her about how all things end. We were on the freeway headed west on the Ventura Freeway in late afternoon while the summer sun in all its crimson splendor slowly sank in the horizon. I casually commented to my daughter who was seated beside me that the sun will die too someday, like everything else. With alarm showing in her face, she asked when it was going to happen, and I smiled, patted her on the knee and said that it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Then, I added to tamp down her visible concern, maybe not for another five to nine billion years or so, nearly twice the length of time it took to form the solar system and all its planets in its present form, if the educated guess of scientists are to be believed. And provided of course, that there is no large-sized asteroid or cosmic debris careening off its track, hurling itself helter-skelter onto earth as many believe happened some 65 million years ago. The resulting thick cloud of dust blocking sunlight for years killed off the plants, the food source and fatally disrupting the food chain effectively wiping off the dinosaurs which had ruled the earth for millions of years. It was the end for the terrible lizards but a beginning for the ascendancy of man to come about. earth has become a tabula rasa for the Age of Mammals, bringing forth a new thinking, feeling life form to take shape and rule the planet.
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