A new moon a few days ago, and we didn’t even get a chance to notice.
That’s the problem of contemporary life, but also of climate change so damaging our weather patterns that we cannot even predict when we will have a clear night sky. We are entering the season of the Leonids and Perseids, as the colonial world refers to them, and whether we shall be able to see a single one remains an open question.
If we do, it will undoubtedly feel like an omen.
Then the question becomes what kind: for good? for ill? what?
Yesterday evening, I watched the rain fall from the sky, wide single drops in the light of a full sun like so much scattered glitter tossed from the spirit world. That will probably all in the way of shooting stars that we shall be able to see.
Then the weather turned violent once more, no longer merely rain but hail, pelting on the full horizontal.
For today, the forecast remains much the same, which is to say, it’s likely to track neither the predictions nor our common patterns. Whether we are able to see this night’s sky is a toss-up, too.
But the stars are up there, whether we can see them or not.
It’s comforting, somehow, to know that these shimmering beings, older than time, remain constant in an inconstant lower world. The other day, I saw a photo of a nebula taken from the Hubble telescope, and even as flat pixels on a screen, it took my breath away. This photo that Wings shot on film more years ago than we can count now, of the colonially-nominated “Hale-Bopp” comet, still does the same. These beings have seen more than our cosmos will ever know, and will continue to see them long after we are mere stardust ourselves.
Which provides hope for our own stardust selves.
There are worlds beyond this; that we know. Cosmologies disagree on the nature of those worlds: planets and moons and stars; places of past and future; dream worlds and visionary multiverses; spaces where the spirts dwell. But every now and then, we are granted a glimpse of them.
That is how I regard the comets, the meteors, the shooting stars. No death symbols these, at least not anything so final as we conceive that word to mean; no, these are messages from other worlds, from other times, from beings more powerful that we will ever comprehend.
And they hold out hope that one day, our stardust selves will understand.
~ Aji
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