9 Quotes by Sasha Sagan

My parents taught me that the provable, tangible, verifiable things were sacred, that sometimes the most astonishing ideas are clearly profound, but when they get labeled as "facts", we lose sight of their beauty. It doesn't have to be this way. Science is the source of so much insight worthy of ecstatic celebration.

Every single one of us appears seemingly from nowhere and then, eventually, returns to nowhere. We are conceived, we grow, and we die, but what happens beyond that is a great, haunting mystery. We grapple with it by marking how and when things change here on Earth, both cyclically and permanently.

The ideas that “everything happens for a reason” or that certain things are “meant to be” are often offered as reassurances. But, to me, they are not as astounding or awe-inspiring as the idea that, in all this chaos, somehow you are you.

Ritual purification, both spiritual and physical, is common to many religions. It often comes from the idea that human bodies are dirty, innately flawed in their functionality and earthliness. I don’t see it that way. I think the parts of us that bleed and orgasm and eat and sweat are sacred too. It’s all part of the astounding, intricate machinery of being alive.

Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change. There is so much change in this universe. So many entrances and exits, and ways to mark them, each one astonishing in its own way. Even if we don’t see birth or life as a miracle in a theological sense, it’s still breathtakingly worthy of celebration.

My parents taught me that the provable, tangible, verifiable things were sacred, that sometimes the most astonishing ideas are clearly profound, but when they get labeled as “facts”, we lose sight of their beauty. It doesn’t have to be this way. Science is the source of so much insight worthy of ecstatic celebration.

Days and weeks go by and the regularity of existing eclipses the miraculousness of it. But there are certain moments when we manage to be viscerally aware of being alive. Sometimes those are terrifying moments, like narrowly avoiding a car accident. Sometimes they are beautiful, like holding your newborn in your arms. And then there are the quiet moments in between when all the joy and sorrow seem profound only to you.

There is one more way I time travel back to my father. When I was little he told me that air particles stay in our atmosphere for such a long time that we breathe the same air as the people who lived thousands of years ago. I think about that often now. I can take a deep breath and know that some fraction of those particles were once breathed by my dad. What an intimate thing it is to breathe the air of someone you loved.

Growing up in our home, there was no conflict between science and spirituality. My parents taught me that nature as revealed by science was a source of great, stirring pleasure. Logic, evidence, and proof did not detract from the feeling that something was transcendent – quite the opposite. It was the source of its magnificence.