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Corrine Rojas

@planet.rojas

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observing Earth from a healthy distance of 676.5 km. formerly on Mars, the Moon, and AZ. 🏜️ 🪐 ✨
opinions + views are my own, not those of my employer

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Summer 2026 you did not disappoint 🩷 Grateful for all my friends who always make my life a little brighter ✨

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So thankful for this bunch of weirdos ❤️

#renaissance #30 #birthday #friends

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“For some weeks I’ve been worried about the health of family and friends. Today I’ve stared at a computer screen for hours. My eyes hurt. My heart, too. Feeling the need for air, I go sit on my back doorstep and see a rook, a sociable species of European crow, flying low towards my house through greying evening air. Straight away I use the trick I learned as a child, and all my difficult emotions lessen as I imagine how the press of cooling air might feel against its wings. But my deeper relief doesn’t come from imagining I can feel what the rook feels, know what the rook knows—instead, it’s slow delight in knowing I cannot. These days I take emotional solace from knowing that animals are not like me, that their lives are not about us at all. The house it’s flying over has meaning for both of us. To me it is home; to the rook? A waypoint on a journey, a collection of tiles and slopes, useful as a perch, or a thing to drop walnuts on in autumn to make them shatter and let it winkle out the flesh inside.

“But there is something else. As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. We noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.”

-Helen Macdonald, “Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays,” 2020

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Had an amazing time at @nasa’s #pacesocial! I have a whole video up on YouTube talking about my experience there. Go watch it now!

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“I’m weary of words. Our national discourse has become loud and shrill. Everywhere we go, in doctors’ offices, airport lounges, bars and restaurants, dozens of talking heads bombard us with opinions. Politics has become a warfare of words, verbal grenades lobbed back and forth, shattering our ear drums. The blogosphere gets ever more angry, metastasizing into a hundred million malignant cells. I weary even of my own words, which have their own abrasive edge. More and more, I long for silence, most especially my own.

“Henry David Thoreau rejoiced in the hoot of the owl in the twilight woods. But he also took note of the interval between the hoots, a deepened silence that suggested ‘a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.’ That’s where I want to go, into the silent interval, deepened and made more alluring by the bracketing hoots.

“The silence Thoreau speaks of is not just an absence of sound, separate from nature. It is the vast and unarticulated nature which lies beyond our present knowing.

“We call the origin of the universe the Big Bang. But there was no ‘bang.’ There was energy, light, then matter, and — and silence. The world came into being wrapped in silence. We speak, we write, we blog, we chatter, and all of that is what makes us human, but it’s all idle when disconnected from the great silence which is the universe. We make sacraments of owls — audible signs of the silence between the hoots. Silence is the great teacher that cautions us to hold our tongue in the face of what we do not know. On which note, I will shut up.”

-Chet Raymo

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In the MRAV at @nasa with @planeta.rojas & @mv.nyc 📸 by @dhlavsa 💜

@nasakennedy #Norwegian #CurveModel #NASASocial #KeepingPACE #NASA #MRAV

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#NASASocial Pt. II: the Group 💙

Although I wasn’t able to experience the launch in person due to weather delays, I will always be grateful I was able to meet this amazing group of people, including the team behind PACE. Here’s to many more adventures at @nasa in my future and grateful to @historymiami for the opportunity.

#KeepingPACE #NASA

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(Looking at the brokenness of the world, it’s been important to me to recall songwriter Leonard Cohen’s words: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” May you find the light. Wishing you a year of joy – and hope. Hope you enjoy this poem…)

Flying Over West Texas at Christmas

Oh, little town far below with a ruler line of a road running through you, you anonymous cluster of houses and barns, miniaturized by this altitude in a land as parched as Bethlehem might have been somewhere around the year zero—  A beautiful song should be written about you which choirs could sing in their lofts and carolers standing in a semicircle could carol in front of houses topped with snow.  For surely some admirable person was born within the waffle-iron grid of your streets, who then went on to perform some small miracles, placing a hand on the head of a child or shaking a cigarette out of the pack for a stranger.  But maybe it is best not to compose a hymn or chisel into tablets the code of his behavior or convene a tribunal of men in robes to explain his words.  Let us not press the gold leaf of his name onto a page of vellum or hang his image from a nail. Better to fly over this little town with nothing but the hope that someone visits his grave  Once a year, pushing open the low iron gate then making her way toward him through the rows of the others before bending to prop up some flowers before the stone.

-Billy Collins

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“For some weeks I’ve been worried about the health of family and friends. Today I’ve stared at a computer screen for hours. My eyes hurt. My heart, too. Feeling the need for air, I go sit on my back doorstep and see a rook, a sociable species of European crow, flying low towards my house through greying evening air. Straight away I use the trick I learned as a child, and all my difficult emotions lessen as I imagine how the press of cooling air might feel against its wings. But my deeper relief doesn’t come from imagining I can feel what the rook feels, know what the rook knows—instead, it’s slow delight in knowing I cannot. These days I take emotional solace from knowing that animals are not like me, that their lives are not about us at all. The house it’s flying over has meaning for both of us. To me it is home; to the rook? A waypoint on a journey, a collection of tiles and slopes, useful as a perch, or a thing to drop walnuts on in autumn to make them shatter and let it winkle out the flesh inside.

“But there is something else. As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. We noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.”

-Helen Macdonald, “Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays,” 2020

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“I pick an orange from a wicker basket and place it on the table to represent the sun. Then down at the other end a blue and white marble becomes the earth and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.
I get a glass from a cabinet, open a bottle of wine, then I sit in a ladder-back chair, a benevolent god presiding over a miniature creation myth,
and I begin to sing a homemade canticle of thanks for this perfect little arrangement, for not making the earth too hot or cold not making it spin too fast or slow
so that the grove of orange trees and the owl become possible, not to mention the rolling wave, the play of clouds, geese in flight, and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.
Then I fill my glass again and give thanks for the trout, the oak, and the yellow feather,
singing the room full of shadows, as sun and earth and moon circle one another in their impeccable orbits and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.”

-Billy Collins (poet), “As if to Demonstrate an Eclipse”

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Networking season delivered all the networking I could ever want/need/yearn #sfn2023

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“You are made from the remnants of stars. When stars die, they throw off their outer layers, releasing their contents to the magnificent nothingness and absolute everything that is the universe. Your body is composed of the products of such cosmic events, those remnants of burning giants. The carbon inside you, accounting for about 18 percent of your being, could have existed in any number of creatures or natural disasters before finding you. You see, you are not so soft after all; you are rock and wave and the peeling bark of trees, you are ladybirds and the smell of a garden after the rain. When you put your best foot forward, you are taking the north side of a mountain with you.”

-Ella Frances Sanders, “Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe,” 2019

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