Billions...

Consider the rear garden.

From a certain remove — from, say, the altitude at which the Voyager spacecraft turned to photograph the Earth before passing beyond the boundary of the solar system — 70 Scituate Street, Arlington, Massachusetts is invisible. The garden behind it, where the gathering will take place on the seventeenth of May, cannot be distinguished from the continent it sits on, which cannot be distinguished from the pale blue dot it belongs to, which hangs in a shaft of scattered sunlight, alone, in the dark.

And yet.

We are a species that makes things. We cannot seem to help it. Out of the raw material of time and effort and the particular kind of courage it takes to stand up in front of people and attempt something difficult, the Boston Magic Lab has made a season of wonder. Not the wonder of supernovae or the wonder of the deep ocean or the wonder of a universe so vast that the numbers required to describe it have no meaning to the human nervous system.

The small wonder. The human wonder.

Which is, in its way, the most astonishing kind.

The cosmos is under no obligation to make sense to us, and it largely does not. But every so often, in a garden, in May, at one o’clock in the afternoon, something happens that almost does. People who found each other, who made something together, who stood at the edge of the possible and reached — these people sit down at a table and eat food that Jeannine has cooked, and for a moment, just a moment, the universe seems to be arranged correctly.

It isn’t, of course. The stars are still dying. The distances are still incomprehensible. Entropy has not been suspended for the afternoon.

But Jeannine is at the grill.

And the smoke goes up.

And the light in a rear garden in May is doing what that light has done for four and a half billion years, falling on whatever is below it, indifferent and gorgeous, and what is below it on this particular afternoon is the Magic Lab, gathered, as they have gathered before, as they will gather again, as humans have gathered since long before there were rear gardens or addresses or invitations — around a fire, together, briefly, on this small and beautiful world.

Felice has organized everything.

Bring something.

Come to the garden.

We are made, all of us, of star stuff.

Shine bright together.

70 Scituate Street, Arlington. May 17th, 2026. One o’clock. The rear garden.

Produced by Felice & the Cosmologists, Boston Magic Lab.

The coordination of provisions is forthcoming, which, on the scale of cosmic time, is essentially immediate.