World AIDS Day: Orion's rainbow

As we mark another World AIDS Day, I remember the day I got my diagnosis - in Aug. 1992 in WI on the phone from my MD who called with the results because he knew I was concerned. I'd recently gotten a job with health benefits and one of the first things I did was have the test, which I'd avoided doing in order not to have a pre-existing condition which would make it impossible to get coverage. I remember literally having the pins knocked out from under me - one moment I was standing answering the phone the next I was in a chair & didn't remember sitting down. I remember feeling dirty - there was something in my blood that could kill. In those days a diagnosis of AIDS was pretty much a death sentence - the time between diagnosis and death usually around 4 years. I wondered if I'd see my 40th birthday (I was 38 at the time), whether I'd live to see the year 2000. I must have had that statistic in the back of my mind because around 1996 I went into a deep depression - withdrew from the world (from which withdrawal my playing career has not yet recovered), waited to die.

Fortunately I didn't. After a couple years I realized I missed the flute, there was a reason I'd studied if for so long, gotten a doctorate and I returned to it with new-found passion and joy. Can it be it's 20 years since that day in August? I can't believe it.

Turning from within to without, I share with you the incredible photo above that was taken by the Herschel Space Observatory. It's a view of the Orion nebula, which is "is found below the three belt stars in the famous constellation of Orion the Hunter." I heard about the observatory on a recent Nova PBS broadcast, "Hunting the edge of space"the first chapter of which I've linked below. I was struck by the fact that, quoting the transcript, "Earth and our solar system lie in a spiral arm in the suburbs of our galaxy, dwarfed within a giant disk of 200 billion stars, spinning together around a bright central bulge that hides a supermassive black hole. The Milky Way is so large, it would take 100,000 years, traveling at the speed of light—that's 670 million miles per hour—to cross from one edge to the other."

Watch Hunting the Edge of Space: Part 1 on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Compared to the vastness of this universe, 20 years is less than the blink of an eye. Who could imagine that the universe holds images of such beauty? That technology could bring that beauty to our computer screens? I feel so lucky to have survived this long, in relatively good health, alive to the beauty that surrounds me.