On this Monday, dawn is a hazy affair: What are normally sharply clear skies this time of year are veiled instead, wrapped loosely in the conjoined embrace of clouds and smoke, the offspring of distant wildfires and a line of even more distant storms.
Absent a shift in the winds, the smoke will settle in for a while. The clouds are another matter; the current forecast speculates that we may yet see rain before noon, which, if it proves to be true, would bring a welcome break in the heat.
Still, in the indigo hours, those early moments before Father Sun rises in the morning and those at day’s end before he falls fully asleep, it is the stars who command the skies. They are the runway lights for the path of sun and moon as they pass each other in their daily journey, the dust of the time of pure magic when the whole world stands at the threshold between day and night, night and day.
I like to think of this morning’s haze as the same cosmic dust: the detritus of star’s fire and comet’s ice, spiraling across the sky to settle around us like a summer blanket, one so thin you can see through its faint yet very real shimmer. We use the stars, after all, to navigate — to draw a map of the road we are to travel each day, and to light our path as we make the journey.
The stars are light of a less intrusive sort, beings who guide us in ways both practical and protective. To our peoples, these are no alien creatures, but comfortable and familiar spirits, some of whom were once as mortal and foolish as we, but now as old as eternity and nearly as wise, ready to impart their own hard-earned lessons to us so that we may avoid troubling and troubled fates.
We speak of the stars as elders and spirits, as relatives and old friends. Morning Star; Evening Star; North Star; Guiding Star; Shooting Star; Falling Star . . . all have their roles to play in the microverses within our many cultural cosmos. Each is a being of great beauty and a presence of great power.
The Morning Star heralds the dawn, and reminds us of the place whence we come, in a sense. The Evening Star reassures us that, whether it is the end of a single day or the end of our own longer one, the one upon which our spirits will begin their final journey, we will not spend those moments without a source of the light.
The North Star and the Guiding Star are sometimes one, a spirit with two conjoined faces and selves: that celestial being to whom we look when our world becomes disoriented, when it is time to find our place within our world so that we may move around its hoop on the proper path.
The Shooting Star and the Falling Star embody power of other sorts: the powers of omen and prophecy, of life and death themselves. In the outside world, they go by other names, too, names that assure us that they are not stars at all, but comets, ice instead of fire . . . and yet, perhaps our understanding of them is more complete, recognizing that function is as essential as form when computing identity. Neither exists without the other, a lesson we know from the ways in which we define ourselves.
Small wonder, then, that such signs and wonders should be such an integral part of our cosmologies. They possess an ability that we do not: to dwell where the spirits dwell, and to traverse that great vaulted place we earthbound spirits call the sky. Watching them shimmer and flash, lighting whole worlds and blazing universal trails, they free our own spirits to imagine, to dream, to pursue our visions even as we follow our hearts.
Even during a hazy indigo time such as this, these moments just before a smoke-veiled sunrise, the Morning Star sprinkles our world with stardust, just as her husband of the night will at this day’s sunset. Together, they remind us that our dreams of day and visions of night are given to us for a reason, and that there will be light, however faint and distant, to shine upon our path.
~ Aji
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