Oh Yeah, The Universe

Breaking News? Just Look Up.

I am friends with the middle of the night. 

Sometimes, in the more temperate months, I will exit the dining room’s sliding doors and walk out onto our raised back deck into the darkness.  And look up.  Not too many stars are visible here in the light-polluted suburbs, but some nights are clearer, as well as a blacker black, so more of a detailed celestial canvas than on other nights.  Far beyond its immensity, it is also profoundly quiet.  Then, on rare occasions, within the deep delta waves of night, there are surprises at 2 or 3 a.m.

The other night I stepped out, looked up, scanned the heavens, and in mere seconds… a shooting star!  In all my years here, I have never seen a comet above our home.  It was just a second of arcing luminosity, but it was sky magic nonetheless.  

Yes, I made a wish. 

The next morning, I found out my unexpected visitor was one fiery member of the rumbling Perseid Meteor Shower Gang, an annual event every July and August, with a few nights being the prime viewing nights, like this past Thursday and Friday in our latitude.  My wife swears I am out very late at night waiting, hoping for a UFO overhead, and perhaps a brief chat, and she is not wrong.  As for this small celestial caller, I was not disappointed in that ball of ice and dust flashing past.

Back on Earth I too am held captive by the heavy gravity of unpleasant, neck-snapping news.  Ukraine, the Orange Man and his henchmen, Vlad and the Oligarchs (not my favorite band), Hunter, other Lost Boys, China this, China that, giant gyres of plastic in the Pacific, daily mass murders, and all the burning.  Fire here, fire there; nearly everywhere in flames.   When one has trouble cheerfully looking forward, it makes some sense to look up.

Making the best of being sleepless in the suburbs, I do just that.  Being a creative sleeper, as opposed to a garden variety insomniac, and not one to toss and turn, I get up, find some vino or Tylenol, or both, amble out to the kitchen, and now and then, onto the back deck.  As one who sleeps in different shifts, no two nights are the same.  So many nights-that-are-nearly-mornings become different little adventures for a certain buzzing, intermittently apprehensive, featherless owl.

Now, some time back one pre-pandemic June, I got up around 1:30 or 2 a.m., deciding between herbal tea or red wine, and undecided, walked directly to my sliding glass portal, stepped out, and looked up to see the Little Dipper, Libra, and my birth constellation, Leo.  Or so I thought.  I am no great identifier of stars, surely no celestial navigator, so I just enjoy the insanely distant points of light, and realize how very much we cannot see, even on the clearest night.  I recall that June night was not only especially vivid but bracing.  Above all, it was deeply pleasing, like a gentle splash of cold water on the face.  I remember thinking as soon as I looked up:  Oh yeah. The universe.

Just gently bend your neck, and peer up out there.  It’s magnificent,

To say that there are many things to keep one up at night is akin to saying the earth is a sphere, not a pancake.  The Obvious underlines itself.  To me, so-called Breaking News is more of a repeat, or a pattern, than anything new.  Human drama, while always playing out right in front of us, is not It.  I mean, it’s just not the big picture.   Dolphins torpedo and leap, birds fly high and sing, humans build and destroy.  Also, while forever pretending otherwise, humans adore conflict.  As Vonnegut said, So it goes.

Therefore, it becomes much easier to understand why some very busy or stressed people avoid the news, and why some very smart people become astronomers, astrophysicists, or go to work for NASA or JPL.  Why be a psychotherapist or an archaeologist, always looking in or back, when you can look up and ahead (and yes, also peer back very far, like a few billion years.  Even the stars we see are, after all,  yesterday’s news). 

So what it is It? Standing on a small dock behind our friends’ home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, able to see much of the Milky Way, one can’t help but think this is the biggest news, and the real story.  All the other stuff online or on cable being trifling, passing, largely annoying stuff.  But the Milky Way, that’s the spectacular real deal, The Resplendent Fact beyond mere scattered facts, the It above and beyond the nightly news.

Like a catfish with magic glasses, or some other odd fish, I swim up into the night, pause, and look out at a world looking in at me.  A fish suddenly able to see the ocean I swim in, I finally grasp where I am.  And what I am.  For a long, lovely, nighttime moment, no longer just an observer, no longer apart, but rather very much a part of something vast and unfathomable.  Much more than a waste-producing parasite, I am, for that moment, clean and clear.  I am starstuff surfing stardust.  Or something like that.   

So yes, at 2 or 3 in the morning, in the night’s faraway corner, when the world is bone quiet, and the other parasites are snoring or unconscious to overdue bills or restless leg syndrome, dreaming of coupling and conquest, this fellow is up.  In the hush, shambolic of hair, attire and mind, this one is free to quietly shuffle through the kitchen to the dining room, make some tea or grab a thin slice of turkey, putter by one’s lonesome, inconsequentially, or maybe think thoughts of any size, small and silly or large and profound -- and easily get lost.  In a good way.

Then here, in a pre-dawn stupor, slightly sated with a tart cabernet and a bit of fowl, this one can head to a convenient late night threshold, and edging through, come face to face with slender, tent-top points of light, the actual Big Tent, the biggest big picture, the original face, the great, invisible pulse, the multi-trillion mile trail of mystery and interstellar craftwork, the roofless domicile of dark matter and angel vapors.

Astounded by such vastness and Suchness, peering out at the Father of our Mother, the source of all riches, glistening and endless, with a music more mathematical, more magnificent than Bach himself, we see, and feel, the rocking of our great cosmic cradle, and the vibrations of our first home.  We see the planets and the shooting stars, and more.  We see the whole shooting match, the Great Sea of no harbor, and the place that knows not, cares not, about breaking news or traffic snarls or cancer stats or the weather in Fargo.  Just… This.

The place we dive off from, swim in, return to.  The place that hums endlessly to itself.  And to us.

Late at night, in lieu of sleeping, I shuffled over to my back sliding glass door, opened it, beheld the sky, and saw myself.