Sometimes sleeplessness can be a gift.
It doesn’t feel like it at the time, of course. That’s especially true for someone like for whom constant pain causes chronic insomnia . . . and for whom sleep is essential to manning that pain even minimally. And the last week or so has been spectacularly awful on that front.
But in the early hours of this morning — between one o’clock and three-thirty, roughly — I found myself grateful for the chance to witness the kind of sky we have not seen here in months, perhaps a year or more.
Normally, fall is the time of year when deeper space shows itself to us. It’s a combination of our high altitude and the kind of otherworldly clarity of air that attends an alpine desert in the weeks when summer heat first gives way to early cold. Here, you can see night skies like no other: the Bridge of Stars [what the outside world calls the Milky Way] clearly visible overhead; constellations we never new existed showing themselves in the deepest distance of the dark.
Last night’s was such a sky. More, it was visible even through the barrier of double-paned windows, something I have never been granted the opportunity to see before. And so even sleeplessness serves a purpose, allowing me moments of stillness and silence in which to marvel at the beauty of this extraordinary cosmos into which we were born, moments to witness this medicine of night, and the power of the spirits of the dark.
It’s not just the dark, of course: Last week, in the broad light of day, we were visited twice in three days by the Sun Dogs, omens of power and prophecy, harbingers of change. Then there are the phenomena of dawn and dusk, the liminal spaces of those twilight worlds in which the impossible becomes real: lepidolite skies on the opposite side of the sun; jade above the horizon where it sits; the whole gradient of amber and rose and violet and indigo, lit from above and below and even within. And, of course, there are the other harbinger spirits, the shooting stars and comets arcing across the night.
The subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation is the image that, over the years, has proven to be Wings’s most popular photo of all, with multiple prints purchased by clients all over the country. It’s one that dates back just shy of thirty years now: the astronomical phenomenon the outside world knows as the Hale-Bopp comet, one that products of a colonial culture endeavored to turn into a prophecy fulfillment of their own. Their interpretation of its appearance, of course, bears no relationship to that of our cultures. But clearly they shared in the basic human reaction to its manifestation — as something of great power.
A much-loved friend, an elder and warrior who walked on just over a decade ago, taught me to discern between the real meaning of power and how the colonial world defines it. To them, it’s a word that serves as a catch-all for “authority and control.” To us, it’s an immanence, far greater than us but also something that simply is: It exists, entirely independently of us, and the only negatives attached to it are the ways in which humans choose to warp it for selfish ends.
And so it is with celestial phenomena. Nothing I do will affect whether a meteor falls from the sky or a comet arcs across the horizon; they are traveling to their own purpose, and will do so regardless of my own actions. But they can influence my actions, depending on whether I choose to heed whatever message they might have for us.
And in these days of global climate collapse, the messages are coming thick and fast.
Last night, I saw no movement in the stars — no fall, no arc, no trailing icy fire. But I saw deeper into the night sky than I’ve been able to do in a very long time: beyond the Great Star to true north, beyond the Fisher east of it, and the thousand thousand tiny diamonds that bead the deepest dark of the eastern sky in the earliest hours of the morning. And I felt at peace in a way I had not all day . . . in many days, in fact.
It’s medicine for the spirit — this beauty of the winter night, the power of the spirits of the dark.
~ Aji
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