MAANLANDING: Our global celebration of achieving what's impossible

This stamp only cost 6F but it cost the US government's Apollo program $25B and employed 400,000 people to register 1st place getting mankind to the moon. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Mission's moon landing, the backdrop of climate change and political polarization tint the anniversary with a new black and white: so many ostensibly impossible solutions await our communal acumen. But can we? Will we?

To me, pictures of the US flag on the moon mean more in 2019 than they did to me 10 years ago. Some of us have come of age in a time with few reasons to feel patriotic, rather plagued by the opposite disappointment in the realities of today's America. And yet back then, we did it, and not to claim US territory, but to illustrate US' prowess through smarts, through science, and through grit. 

 I picked this stamp to commemorate the lunar landing because it was not just Americans who seem to have felt, and marked, this moment in time: it was a victory for ingenuity, engineering, economic commitment to see mankind realize a quest as old the first named constellations — to touch this near cousin to our Earth. To touch it with our feet and hands. Evidently 600 million people watched thost first steps on the black and white surface of the moon, through grainy black and white footage on the surface of family room televisions. 

I can do no better to comment on any aspect of this anniversary than the Christian Science Monitor editorial writer has in this piece, Why the moon landing still inspires. What inspires me in the editorial's observerations, as in the spirit I read within depiction of the astronauts of this Belgian stamp, is thus, "Writer Norman Mailer wrote that the project set engineers and computer programmers to dram of 'ways to attack the problems of society as well as they had attacked the problems of putting men on the moon." May this generation's best somehow abound to be the forces of good who are smart, competent and driven just as those NASA engineers of the space race of the 60s.

Transcendency of trains

Even before you can discern the purpose of this stamp, the sparkling blue and brilliant red of its features, fenced by a geometric arch, fetch the heart!  The Høhe Tåstrup Station commemorated in by Denmark in 1986 is a train station 15KM from Copenhagen. Train stations across the world have done well by the architects that design them. In turn, we who visit — from us train-impoverished American tourists from the land of automobiles, to the European and Asian commuters for whom such spaces are literally quotidian — can’t help but be flagged and found illuminated by those high ceilings, transcendent light, and urgent pace. Transcendenthas facets of definition – it means several things, but the version I call on is that “of God, existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe.”

Stepping from the train station onto the train is a portal into yet more expansive moments. I dwell on rich memories of train riding across Europe for work in earlier chapters of my life, with the sweetest feelings of independence, perspective, and gratitude unfolding in my heart as the landscape rolled out the window. Several weeks ago we had the joy of watching our 15month old experience and voice this same exhilaration, as we sped across a short span of Norway’s landscape — her chirps and chippers exactly in tune with the joyful child in our all of our train-appreciating hearts.