stars

On a crisp January night, I look up through the scalloped treetops, at the twinkling mansion of the night sky.

I don’t know much about the constellations or the heavens, or what’s beyond those things, but they make me wonder.

The brightest stars beg me to wish on them.

Standing there in the fresh snow, I wonder if the stars ever want to make wishes on the brightest of us.

I wonder if the night sky – so vast and full of marvel – purposely gives us hopes and dreams in a size too big so that we’ll have something to grow into.

I look up at the stars – the Forget-Me-Nots of the angels – and think about what makes the universe exist.

About how, at one moment or another, since the dawn of time, the stars have compelled everyone who has ever lived to look up.

How every night, no matter what calamities have shaken mankind in the daylight hours, the stars climb into an ancient black sky to shine again, twinkling like a common pulse.

A common pulse that reminds us that we’re all one on this living planet. And only our egos, fears and beliefs separate us.

I search the starry sanctuary of the night sky and wonder why it is that we spend our days questioning. 

But at night, when we look up, we believe.

Maybe it’s because the atoms in each of us are made of stardust. Born somewhere in the eons of time, in the nuclear furnace of exploding stars. At the very least, I think, that has to be the most poetic thing I’ve ever heard about physics.

The cold is seeping into my bones but I stand still, breathing out misty clouds. Wondering if it’s possible to lose our minds. Our rational, critical, analytical left brains. So that, for once, we could be perfectly comfortable believing, rather than knowing.

I decide that the stars speak the forgotten language of our souls. Of our infinite, expansive, limitless selves.  

They remind us of our wonder. And our somedays. That we are small. And, that we are so much more.  

The moon is bright. A white porcelain plate on a black table. She returns, night after night, to let us know that the universe always remains unshaken. She whispers to us that only in the dark is the light revealed.

The Big Dipper tilts towards me. I see the North Star. And I recognize the pattern that makes Orion’s belt.

It’s Wednesday night.

And under all of these aching mysteries of the cosmos, I take out the trash.