Paul Bogard

Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere; so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made.Still if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I__ not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men_but __ou mustn__ be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you even seen,' said Rilke, 'you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in it hand and will not let you fall.

At least when it comes to light pollution what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.

With my naked eye, on nights the moon climbs slowly, sometimes so dusted with rust and rose, brown, and gold tones that it nearly drips earth colors and seems intimately braided with Earth, it feels close, part of this world, a friend. But through the telescope, the moon seems- ironically- farther away_the gray-white moon in a sea of black, its surface in crisp relief, brighter than ever before. I am struck too, by the scene__ absolute silence.

When I lie back and close my eyes, this farthest lip of beach right next to the end of the ocean feels like being up close to an enormous breathing being, the bass drum surf thump reverberating through the sand. Living out here with no lights, alone, you would indeed become sensitive to seasons, rhythms, weather, sounds- right up next to the sea, right up under the sky, like lying close to a lover__ skin to hear blood and breath and heartbeat.

These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere_and, as I grow more and more accustomed to the dark, I realize that what I thought were still clouds straight overhead aren__ clearing and aren__ going to clear, because these are clouds of stars, the Milky Way come to join me. There__ the primal recognition, my soul saying, yes, I remember.

My feeling is that an observer needs to see four hundred and fifty stars to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away_and I didn__ make that number up arbitrarily, that__ the number of stars that are available once you get dimmer than third magnitude. So in the city, you see a dozen stars, a handful, and it__ attractive to no one. And if there__ a hundred stars in the sky it still doesn__ do it. There__ a certain tipping point where people will look and there will be that planetarium view. And now you__e touching that ancient core, whether it__ collective memories or genetic memories, or something else form way back before we were even human_astronomer Bob Berman quoted in The End of Night

I had travelled from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara Desert_one night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn__ the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else I had been. Standing bare chest to cool night, wearing flip-flops and shorts, I let a storm of stars swirl around me. I remember no light pollution, heck, I remember no lights. But I remember the light around me-the sense of being lit by starlight- and that I could see the ground to which the stars seemed to be floating down. I saw the sky that night in three dimensions- the sky had depth, some stars seemingly close and some much farther away, the Milky Way so well defined it had what astronomers call __tructure_, that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to another, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream.It was a time in my life when I was every day experiencing something new. I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay, and the world was imprinting on me its breathtaking beauty (and terrible reality.) Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression, and my lifelong connection was sealed.

In these countless stars, in their clusters and colors and constellations, in the __hooting_ showers of blazing dust and ice, we have always found beauty. And in this beauty, the overwhelming size of the universe has seemed less ominous, earth__ own beauty more incredible. If indeed the numbers and distances of the night sky are so large that they become nearly meaningless, then let us find the meaning under our feet.