Starlight

I’ve been watching politics longer than I’ve been keeping bees, but it’s bad when either gets in the ol’ bonnet. Sometimes when the bees (or the politicians) get wound up and start making too much noise, it’s best to step away.

So I went outside last evening. As the parched landscape cooled under a clear sky, I set up a telescope in the back pasture; Away from the porchlights, and cars, and TV screens hosting Debate Night.

The hay crackled dry, shorn from the first cutting, back when it still rained here in “Dustburg.” The smell of mint rose in the dusk, not used to being driven on.

The stars came out, piercing blazing holes in the deepening velvet, red Antares glowering in the south, blue Vega, queen of the summer night, holding court among the paparazzo of the milky way.

I logged careful observations, comparing the contrast of one set of optics to another.

Humans are funny. We get the point, and then drop it, naming a flower or a color as if the magic is in the classification, or measuring how far we can see into infinity. We’d sell lightning bugs in jars as renewable energy if we could. Yet there we are, reveling in the ancient starlight nonetheless. We’re a mix.

I guess that’s why we must keep trying.

I went wandering after the gig today, ending up in a valley west of Roanoke, heading south instead of across the range, looking for fossils in the cracked seabed that makes up Appalachia, but not finding any. The railroad track stayed quiet, too, simmering in the afternoon in a meditative way.

The traffic stopped me on the way back on I-81. A cicada sang from the tree, and since the wind was zero miles an hour, I could hear it through my open window. The smell of asphalt, the roar of the southbound lanes opposite, the crush of the late June heat, all so real.

It’s good to be here on Earth. Keep looking up.