A weekend away from the city reminded me intensely of the loss I feel at the lack of a true night time. A night time where the darkness turns the sky into a fantastic canvas of inky black studded with a shifting pattern of innumerable stars that indicate the vastness of our cosmos. For city dwellers to be able to see the multitude of stars so thick and layered, the brighter ones seeming to be dripping out of the sky is a luxury. I wonder how many modern humans go their whole life without witnessing this wonder. A sight that is more deeply satisfying than the hype of noisy fireworks or shallow sparkle of fairy-lights.
Away from artificial lights the sky seems so vast and alive, becoming a canvas to write sagas on, just as cultures across the globe have done since time immemorial. The silence too is dense and invites an opening towards what else shares our world with us. There is space to sense the subtle presences of the unseen world, to connect to the Earth’s heartbeat and to remember our smallness in the entirety of creation. Our Earth is alive and pulsing with life that we can easily miss amidst the noise and light of modernity’s 24/7 lifestyle.
These days if I can go outside my house and see a dozen or so stars I am lucky. This is a deep loss for me and yet it feels hard to speak about in a world where connection to the more-than-human world is not considered important, and has, for a lot of city dwellers, been reduced to keeping pets and the occasional hike in the bush or swim in the ocean. In times when we humans have caused a monumental shrinking of the diversity of life and destabilised planetary systems it seems vital that we begin to rebuild our connection to that cosmos we are inhabiting. Yet how can we remember we are a part of the cosmos when we cannot see the stars?
Of This Earth 