For the month of January, I’m participating in Bloganuary, a daily blogging challenge.
Today’s prompt:
How do you feel when you look at the stars?
I feel as small and as insignificant as I believe it’s possible to feel. Not in a negative emotional way, but rather, in the literal, physical sense of the Universe.
The ever-expanding vastness of Space is overwhelming. My brain can’t crunch it, so when I look at the stars, it’s as if I’m the tiniest bit bigger than non-existence. And that’s perfectly ok with me.
It helps me put my life into perspective. I’m here, taking up a minuscule amount of space, for only a finite period of time. When I look at the stars, nothing I’m dealing with is life or death. Stuff simply becomes small shit not to be sweat over.
I get lost in the twinkling beauty. I imagine what people over the millennia have thought about when they looked up to the stars. And then I’m blown away by the fact I learned when I was a kid visiting Chichen Itza in Mexico, where the ancient Mayans plotted the full night sky, by looking down into a reflecting pool in their observatory, El Caracol.
I like looking for the constellations I know: Orion by his belt; the clump of stars making up The Seven Sisters; the scoop of The Big Dipper, and how it points to Polaris, the North Star, which is the handle of the The Little Dipper; and the “W” of Cassiopeia.
Wow. I really do like looking at the stars. I think I’ll have to update my Memory List for this year to find a place, away from as much light pollution as possible, with the Night Sky app in hand, and let my astronomer’s side get lost among the heavens.
My Memory List 