I walked last night
Should say I wandered
I saw the galaxies
And so I pondered
How I would love to roam there, up there
Up in the sky sometime
"Up In The Sky Sometime" - Jonathan Richman
The Big Dipper, distinct in form, glittered into my sweaty eyes on a still and warmish autumn night amidst a set of burpees.
Wow, that sentence sounds like a candidate for submission to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
But really, the fanciest gym couldn't beat the sight of bedazzling stars dancing around in the black sea above me.
I loved astronomy as a kid, learning the basics about the world of stars before my ever-shifting interests went on to other things like airplanes and stamp collecting. Maybe this is where my scientific mind truly outshone my artistic mind. I really dug the concrete stuff like the life-cycle of a star, the heat at which stars burned and the corresponding colors, the chemistry that allowed stars to function, and so far.
On the other hand, the constellations stumped me for the most part. I checked out books from the library that cataloged the constellations to try to figure it all out. Some were easy enough - Orion, the two Dippers, and Cassiopeia - while others escaped my mind completely.
And even then, the Dippers are part of Ursa Major & Ursa Minor - the Big and Little Bear. How someone got bears out of those particular masses of stars I will never know.
But maybe trying to figure out the sky from someone else's POV is a fool's errand. If you really think about it, anyone can create their own constellations out of the hundreds of stars in the sky above. Many perform that same exercise with clouds as they float on overhead on a day where you probably have better things to do but couldn't imagine doing them for the next half-hour or so. So why not the stars?
As I glanced toward the south, I spotted in the stars the runner, both feet elevated off the ground as they stretched for the finish line.
Then I completed my last burpee set. I think someone glancing down from a neighbor's window at me might have thought I was completely nuts by then.
Comfortably Miserable
5 years ago