DEEP FIELD IMAGES OF THE NIGHT SKY IN RELATION TO THE REST OF MY LIFE

Some things you can’t really compare, but for reasons far beyond reach you feel you have to. It can help counterbalance your self-esteem to try realizing how insignificant you are here at the relentless pinpoint of existence. 

On the one hand, we have various local timebound methods of asserting self-significance: one true religions, material possessions, the pyramids and selfies, to offer just a random sampling, but those are small potatoes when you go deep field into the night sky with your mind wide. 

No one can wrestle for long with that reality; it surrounds us with countless lifetimes, a trillion generations wouldn’t begin to cover it. Within your own few decades you feel over time your life’s fabric stretching to its limit; your joints begin to tire at the continuous effort of being, as you physically prepare for your own reconvergence.

Historically, we have attributed these physical life changes to time itself taking a merely chronic toll; more lately in our new scientific version we blame it as well on our dwindling personal supply of telomeres, if you want to stick to that. Plastic surgery is no cure, bionics is no cure, downloading to a motherboard is no cure. There is no ‘cure,’ as there is no disease.

Let’s look up and face it: we are each and all destined to become one again with the entire night sky; what’s the problem with that? What could be more magnificent in scope, more exquisite in detail? What could be a more appropriate continuance to the mysterious yearnings of life toward the stars?

We can all imagine infinitely worse, and often do.

No moon - 

newflooded paddies 

sparkle with galaxies

SPECTACULAR CONJUNCTION

Great moves coming up in the big skydance...

THE SOURCE OF RAINBOWS

It comes to me in the knife-edge cold of the winter night, out here on the deck for one last look at the stars before sleep, that what we all need, what we all seek in the streets and rooms, meadows and museums of our ways, is a place to wonder. Not to be taught, but to wonder. Not to be told, but to wonder: completely from and by ourselves. Where are those places but out in the nature of things, as out in the winter beneath the stars without explanation? Where but in the sudden realization of how remote we are in the vastness we are one with, and in that wall of sudden awareness discover the bright door that opens in ourselves; then to walk through...

ABOUT THE STARS

Kaya is back with us again for a couple of days. Before her bath, took her out onto the deck to see the big bright starworks in the clear night sky, turning round and round up there. Unexpectedly, she laughed and laughed at how wonderful it was, and I had to agree with her.

MEASLY LEONIDS

[Full moon and clouds got in the way of the measly trickle of Leonid meteors we got over here in Asia that I was going to write about, so this is from November 1998. RB]

Tuesday night at around 10 and then again at around 11 I went out onto the deck and scanned the skies for a few freezing minutes looking to see if there were any Leonid meteors in our planetary neighborhood, but saw nothing other than the usual novas and galaxies and black holes, coupla nebulas and star-breeding stellar clouds, dwarf stars, pulsars, pretty much the usual skystuff, so went back in to get warm; I didn't really know what I was expecting, a lot of corner-of-the-eye redstreak falling stars per millisecond I guess, and then during the night I looked through the bedroom skylight whenever I drifted back near the wakeful shore, but saw nothing other than countless potentially life-forming solar systems sprinkled in great bubble-arcs cast across an incomprehensible distance by some unknown force an ungraspable time ago, and went back to sleep.

So it was with some misgiving that at the clanging of my specially set Leonid Meteor Alarm Clock I arose from toasty earthbound blankets at the unearthly hour of 4 am and went out into the cold night upon the deck across which blew a cutting prewintery wind, and laid down a futon for my sleeping bag into which I climbed with stellar haste and whence I looked up into the vast and unknown sea across which galleon earth is sailing, bearing all us galactic Columbuses.

I had turned all the lights out, and being up on the mountainside with no other houses around, and no streetlights, so it was dark, and the only light was the stars, the wind having blown the sky clear as fall winds do best, and there above my face was nothing but stars, as close as my nose in a way (what's a billion miles to a star? or for that matter to a nose?); seemed like so many more stars at 4am than at 10pm, eyes fresh from the light of dreams see so much more than eyes fresh from the light of waking, and there are so many more stars in skies than in skylights.

So I watched with freezing face as my eyes plunged into star-level darkness until there were clouds of stars, and then FLASH! A glowing opalescent tube stretched followably across perhaps one-third of the sky; then within seconds, another one and another, good ones, at about a rate of every thirty seconds or so.

One, streaking low down toward the east, seemed to bounce and then flash more brightly, almost as bright as lightning. This went on till around 5:30, when half the universe rolled over into daylight, taking me with it.