One of his poems describes seeing light from various perspectives, including the “starfield” he mentioned to me, and how he was blinded and left unable to think because of the enormity of its light. Zack wrote poetry as a way of processing his time in space. It was like I was being guided by something. They flowed from my mind through a pen onto a piece of paper. I’d sit in my living room and all these thoughts would come flowing through, so I began writing them down.
When I came back from my flight, we were all totally exhausted.
I don’t know whether you’d call it spiritual or not, but when I saw the starfield out there in a way that nobody else has ever seen. And all of a sudden, the star patterns out there became something that I was not ready for. (A)t some points in my orbit around the moon, I was sheltered from both the earth and the sun, so I was in complete darkness. Looking at the universe out there from my vantage point, I began to realize that we don’t know crap about anything, we really don’t. Although he was busy with NASA assignments, he did take time to take in the view outside his window. The only astronaut I have interviewed so far who had a deep emotional reaction to and internal transformation from the view of stars he had from the deep darkness of space was an Apollo crewmember in his 80s, whom I call Zack, who spent several days in orbit around the Moon while the rest of his crew explored the lunar surface below. This allowed him to take a look toward another section of the Milky Way galaxy (our own galaxy) and he was stunned by what his dark-adapted eyes were able to view.Īs I wrote in my 2020 article The Overview E ff ect and the Ultraview E ff ect: How Extreme Experiences in / of Outer Space Influence Religious Beliefs in Astronauts: Zack had managed, during a mission, to find himself in utter darkness and solitude on board his spacecraft and was temporarily out of communication. From 2017-2018 I conducted several interviews with an astronaut (whom, following anthropological conventions on confidentiality, I refer to as "Zack").
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