Back to the stars

Where I get in touch with the night sky is in the cemetery around the corner from my house. A big open area without stones or monuments allows me to bend my head back, and turn around to get a 360 of the sky over Roslindale. Often the sky over Boston, illuminated by city lights reflected from low clouds as pink as a soiled stuffed rabbit. When the clouds are high and thin or patchy, they glow as pale as sheep. When the moon is up and full, matte rather than shiny, and strong enough to cast long shadows at my feet, I love to look on its birthmarked face. In the rest of the sky on those nights, one, maybe two, stars are visible.

Ringing the place are street lights and, at the Walk Hill entrance, a searchlight-intensity 'security' light on the medical lab across the way. So what I don't see is the Milky Way and its plethora of stars, stars in their profusion, stars upon stars, stars in the gaps between stars and, in the gaps between these, stars that are actually galaxies beyond ours, themselves collections of innumerable stars, all extending billions of light years out in every direction. What I don't see is our universe.

Hey, you, universe, the address of all that is, thanks for having me. I want to recognize the fact that you're not a backdrop, some scrim in the back of the stage sprinkled with sequins. Rather you are the place of everything. It may be that nowhere else is there any interest in politics or celebrities or technology or my love, but these things do have their location, albeit less than minuscule, in your vastness.

It's not as though you're nosy or intrusive. Local phenomena like solar storms and asteroids do shake us up, and cosmic rays stream down on us and even through us. A nearby nova, much less supernova, could call down the curtain on us without so much as a by-your-leave. Otherwise, you, universe, just are, on and on. Maybe there are other universes or alternative branes but you are plenty, more than enough. This sky if I could see it would, I'm told, make the point abundantly clear: we are a small part of something huge, one among many many.

People who live where there is real darkness and not this latte substitute say the stars in their multitudes even illuminate the ground below their feet; report awe, bare naked awe, at the spectacle; and sometimes are just silent, lost in wonder, their eyes dragging their minds into the abyss of endlessness.

But I don't see you, oh universe, in this way because we have painted over the window of the sky with photons which direct our gaze down and around, but not up. For sure, our dramas are largely played out inside our light dome, but when our tight little island seems claustrophobic, contemplating your majestic extension may give our minds the room they need. As so often, to see we have to turn out the lights.