Meteors and Majesty

In between the anticipation of announcing a Storytelling 2024 class and wondering how it’ll all pan out, I had that little voice in the back of my head nagging at me to get outside and look at the stars. It didn’t hurt that this time of year brings about the Geminid meteor shower so, with the weather and my camera cooperating, I took a drive over to our local community garden to set up.

It probably would’ve been better on Wednesday, when most people were out taking shots I’m told, but, last night wasn’t a miss by any stretch. You can just make out the streak in the top middle of the above photograph and in the shot just below.

I love the night sky for all of its resplendent glory. There’s this tremendous weight it places on us, a humility it drives to our core reminding us of how infintesimally small we are in the cosmic scheme of creation. It’s a wonder, then, how each day we strut around with such hubris as to pretend we’re the center of the universe.

There’s nothing I can really add to what is already a fundamentally majestic scene. We have the tools to “capture” these moments, to see the cosmos at play, rocketing meteors and asteroids from one end of our visible horizon to the other. It’s a spectator sport of celestial scale and I’m here for it.

It doesn’t require a camera to capture these moments. For every frame that includes a tell-tale streak, there are others only seen by our own two eyes. Standing there last night with the cold wind whipping about my uncovered face and working its way through every seam possible, I saw several of these messengers flash across the sky as well. That it’s not captured by a camera is perfectly ok; I have that experience indelibly etched in my mind.

The stories we tell, these experiences we have, don’t always have to come from the surreal or the out-of-the-ordinary. As a matter of fact, there’s this natural desire to come back to what is ordinary, banal, perhaps even taken for granted and breath new life into it. Anyone can see the sky; it’s not blocked by a nation-state, an oligarch (though they try), or by some facetious god. It’s delightfully ordinary but ours for the viewing and understanding.

My dear souls, grab ahold of the ordinary and use it to tell your stories. Use it as a foundational truth to who and what you are, and when perhaps you’re at your wit’s end, it’ll be the soft landing you need.

May it ever (and always) be so.