infinite beyond-ness

(for a good friend who said I was lacking the aforementioned Joy promised by the title of this site. Here you go, Sweet.)

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The sky has been so clear that I almost lost control of my vehicle coming home the other night, as I glanced out the window and saw so many stars that they blurred together in a mist of light-- above me, the Milky Way sprawled across the ink black night.

There are places I’ve lived and traveled where I’ve often forgotten to stop and look up, so caught up in my day that I couldn't see beyond what was in front of me. But Hawaii has a sky that won't be ignored; fused to the landscape by clouds gathered at the seams between earth and sky.

Maybe only in Santa Fe, have I seen similar.

A few days earlier, I carried a blanket outside at dusk, with my children at my heels, and draped it over the grass just beyond our front porch so we could watch the stars come out. They wiggled around and listened to my ramblings on the unfathomable giganticness of the universe and how tiny we are by comparison. They counted stars until they couldn't keep track on their fingers and toes.

"Boys," I said with conviction, "Think of it this way: There are roughly 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and maybe 100 billion galaxies like ours in the known universe, which is expanding outward into something (we don't know what). If you counted all of the stars just in our galaxy, say at one number a second, it would take you 3,000 years to finish," I quoted from recent readings in astrobiology. They seemed both awed and unconvinced.

One thing is for sure though...you can feel it from here, just looking up, where there’s nothing between you and all that, up there.