The James Webb Space Telescope launched Christmas Day from the European Space Agency’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana (South America). This space telescope, developed by NASA with contributions from the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, was named after James E. Webb, administrator of NASA 1961 – 1968, who was a major contributor in the Apollo program.

This week, while the space telescope is still on the way to its intended parking spot, Lagrange Point 2 or L2 for short, a gravitational ‘sweet spot’ a million miles from earth, it finished unfurling its 18 interlocking, segmented mirrors covering a span of 270 sq ft, which will be tweaked and adjusted for the next several months as it finishes moving into place. To accomplish this, the telescope has already completed 50 major deployments, and released 178 pins, all done remotely, or automatically. The scientists and engineers successfully realized the completion of 20+ years of work.

Yeah, that’s outrageous, unprecedented, cool science, but so what? I’m glad you asked.

We are coming up on our annual practice of envisioning this coming Friday night and Saturday. We are gathering to see if we can glimpse our own future, what our individual and collective God-selves can imagine CSL Tucson becoming. We’ll do this a couple different ways, and explore some different time lines.

On Friday night, we’ll do a collective visioning practice, where we allow ourselves to receive in words, images, sounds, smells, songs – whatever, and however our higher selves choose to communicate with us. We’ve gotten some good clues from this year’s monthly continuing Vision Core practice – it’s about us becoming more diverse and inclusive, broadening our horizon, and expanding our outreach. It’s about getting curious about who, and what, we can be in Tucson. It’s about the office watch party, which ‘just so happened’ to happen this past week, welcoming a guy to join them off the street who had seen our ad in the Natural Awakenings magazine.

On Saturday morning, we’ll get into the weeds a little bit — what are we willing to do during 2022, and who is willing to participate in those activities. Just like the untold number of NASA teams and individual contributors who worked (for a long time) to manifest the vision of the Webb, it takes teamwork on earth for us to manifest the vision of what we wish to become. These are not ‘board only’ actions, or ‘Rev Janis only’ actions, though there probably will be some of those, too. These are activities that will be led, guided, and supported by all, many and some of our community participants.

We won’t get it right for every little thing. Last year, we imagined several activities that really took off, and others never got their legs under them. That’s part of the creative exploration that we are doing here. We won’t know what will work, and what will really work, until we try stuff out.

I invite you to join us on the Sunday morning zoom link on Friday night, January 14th (5:30-7pm) and Saturday, January 15th (10-noon), to see what wants to be done by Spirit, and by us, in 2022.

–Rev Janis Farmer