After much wrangling, the International Astronomers Union has demoted Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet." Does it matter what we call it? Maybe not. It brings Walt Whitman to mind:
When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add,
divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Which, in turn, leads back to a couple of lines from the Tao Te Ching:
If you give up learning, troubles end (20).
The knowing are never learned
and the learned never knowing. (81)
There is always knowing beyond our human learning. We create categories and concepts in an attempt to explain the universe, the Way, but these ideas are partial and flawed. If we focus too intently on individual things, the "planets" in and of themselves, isolated from their context by our human-made analytic frameworks, we risk blinding ourselves to how all things relate to one another in infinately complex and beautiful ways.
Names matter less than presence.
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