Am I the only person who thinks living on the moon is a stupid idea? Don't get me wrong: I absolutely love the moon. In fact, you could even say it saved my life. But that doesn't make me want to live on its freezing, airless expanse.

According to CNN, though, an "international" team of scientists thinks this kind of, ahem, lifestyle, can and should be pursued. Let's live in a lava tube on the moon, they assert, especially since it's protected from the harsh temperatures found on the surface!

I know an even better way to avoid freezing our asses off in outer space. Stay home. Lest you think me a curmudgeonly luddite, well you are probably right on some level, but rest assured my opposition to our proposed lunar colony has nothing to do with a generalized dislike of technology nor does it reflect a simplistic desire to oppose any plan I didn't come up with myself.

Instead, my reasons are twofold, rational and spiritual.

First, the reasonable reason not to live on the moon. Life as we know it does not exist there. I know we are saturated with fantasies of outer space romps--Avatar only the latest in a long series of such narratives, including some of my earliest memories sitting down to family dinner while the stoic pointy-eared guy and his humorless buddy battling space-babes and cheaply-costumed monsters on television --but in reality, nothing suggests that we would thrive outside of the environment in which we evolved. Nothing. Instead we would need to import the necessities, air and water being the two most salient, in order to dummy up a version of, well, earth. So why not stay here instead of building Potemkin villages on the moon?

The second reason for leaving the moon alone, the spiritual one, stems from something that happened to me when my mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1995. I was used to using my intelligence to solve problems, and I was pretty good at it. I'd scored a couple of college degrees (BA, MA), was closing in on the big one (PhD), and so prided myself on being able to reason with the best of them. (See, for example, the excellent reasoning in the previous paragraph where I point out that living on the moon is a stupid idea because the environment there would in every way be inimical to our flourishing, lava tube or nay.)

So faced with my precious mom's devastating diagnosis, I jumped on this problem like I did every other, setting out to fix it by learning everything I could about the disease and changing everything I could about her diet, thoughts, medication, and habits, in order to save her life by curing this vicious cancer.

But there was only one problem. It didn't work. Mom got sicker. The tumors continued to sprout. Making her eat raw onion juice only caused her to puke. Nobody was happy with me. I didn't know what to do.

In an ironic twist, I found my answer in yet another attempt to force her to get better. I had read in the various Bernie Siegel-type fix-your-sickness books which I was madly consuming that it was important to have a relaxed mental state in order for your immune system to work optimally. So I dragged my mom off to meditation. This was not something I had ever done before or had any interest in doing now. Reason was my cure-all. All the other stuff was voodoo bunk for pansies.

But this was about my mom's life, so I loaded her fragile body into the car and drove over to the Robert and Beverly Lewis Cancer Care Center in Pomona for the visualization classes I had hard about when I was bringing her there for radiation treatments. Even though I attended only to fix my mom, I went ahead and did the hour-long meditation, listening as the leader instructed us to go down a flight of ten imaginary stairs and into a safe place only we had access to. Always the excellent student, I did as I was told. And when the lights came up an hour later, I was a changed woman. I didn't know the stress I was under, trying to make the world spin the way I wanted--needed--it to. This brief glimpse into another way of living, the practice of letting go, made me hungry for more. And I have gotten it.

So what's all this got to do with the moon? Because I realized reason wasn't enough, and could in fact be way too much, I needed to find a way to balance it with something else, the ineffable, the intuitive. For religious people this balance is easily achieved by adherence to theologies that explain everything--explain the ineffable even--and then offer a path to follow in order to have that sense of personal powerlessness necessary to temper ego. There's a big old god, he's mad and nice, do this and not that, blah blah blah.

No, clearly I am not cut out for religious obedience. Why? Well, I am a Scorpio, I am a Feminist, I am the descendant of revolutionaries on both sides, I'm an intellectual, I come from an alcoholic family tree--none of these things predispose one to a love of authority. So mindless adherence to somebody else's god wasn't going to work. And mindlessness is absolutely necessary.

This is where the moon fits in. Desperate to find a way to make sense of the nonsensical--mom is sick, her bones are sprouting tumors, I can't fix this, she doesn't deserve it--I chose to surrender to the forces of the universe over which I am powerless. And the most obvious of these, to me, is this visible moon, looming over us in the sky. I didn't hang it. I don't know who did. I don't know why it is there or we are here. I don't know what is going to happen, today, tomorrow, a hundred years from now, when I die, when you die, none of it.

And in my admission of this ignorance, I found--and find--bliss.

Mom died. So will I. So will you. But I am happy to say that when she died, I had become safe for her to be around. I wasn't trying to fix, or blame, or scold. I wasn't pretending she was going to get better anymore--which she thanked me for. I wasn't planning on revenge against her doctor for blowing off the back pain that turned out to be myeloma.

I was in acceptance. I continue to be. And the moon makes all of this possible.

So leave it alone. Get honest. Admit your powerlessness over gravity. Your need for oxygen. And get grateful. For what we have, not for what we don't. When all else fails, and that big nasty ego comes in to tell you that you have all the answers, look up at the moon and honestly answer this question: did you hang it?

Then leave it alone. And join me in living joyously on this green planet. Oh, and, there's plenty here that needs attention, in case you haven't noticed.