 Starry, Starry Night
February 2002
Last night I awoke at about 3:30, got up to pee and then remembered this was the day of the Leonid meteor shower. I stumbled out onto my terrace in the dark, inhaled the damp night air, and gazed upward. The stars twinkled all about, but the night sky seemed quiet. I found the north star, I found the big dipper, I found Orion - the first constellation my father ever taught me to identify and one that will forever remind me of him (we've agreed to meet up there someday when we're both reduced to ether and nitrogen and other primordial elements).
Just as I was turning to go inside, my first gift of the midnight gods appeared, streaking across the sky's dome above - huge, magnificent, with a long sweep of a tail the continued to echo through the sky for several long seconds. I sat down in a chair, lay back, and waited again. After a few moments, there came another, a smaller one. And then another. And another. All different shapes and sizes, some so dim I almost doubted their presence and others so glorious and screaming I thought they may just land in my lap. I decided to count - a few years ago early one morning here I spotted 19 and thought that must be some kind of record of the shooting stars, some sure signal from God that I and my life, this life, our life were blessed, and I knew tonight would far surpass that.
I got to ten and the night seemed to quiet down again. I returned to bed, dreamed of chakras and shooting stars. My bed here in St. John is huge and cozy, and looks right out over the bay, making anything but the sweetest sleep inevitable.
An hour later I woke again, and again stumbled out onto the terrace. The night sky had heated up considerably by now, and the gentle breeze had cooled considerably, so I wrapped a damp beach towel around me and lay on my back again and watched. I watched shooting stars like I'd never watched before. Shooting from east to west, from west to east, high up in the ceiling of the sky and then far off on the eastern horizon. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Then a pause.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, then another pause for the firework magicians to reload their barrels with fresh explosives. Then the wild night dance would begin again, with star after star after star. Remember that old song, "Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket?" My pockets were full and I'd turned up my skirt to catch a few more and still they were pouring all about me, dropping from heaven to earth, second after second after second.
Still on my back I tried to broaden my vision as far as I could, from center to periphery, remaining alert but soft in the eyes. You can't TRY to find a shooting star, I kept reminding myself, you have to wait for the shooting star to find you. You put yourself in the place where shooting stars are most likely to happen, you offer your intention and your attention, and then you soften, surrender, and wait. For awhile nothing seems to happen, even though you know that miles and miles away some chunk of rock is hurtling into our orbit and dying a spectacular death. And then just when you give up, when you let go of every expectation of ever seeing another one again, whoosh, bing, bang, the stars start flying again. There's a life lesson in there, somewhere, I wondered somewhere between falling star thirty-five and thirty-eight.
I love how the eyes know how to find them, though. How you rest back and watch and wait, and the eyes jump to the bright, streaking light before the brain even realizes what has passed before it. Do you think each of us contains a "shooting star reflex" somewhere deep inside? Somewhere nestled into the part of us that instinctively turns toward beauty, I suppose. I imagined God somewhere up in the great beyond, tracing his long finger along an arc of the midnight sky, leaving sparks of shooting stars trailing behind in his finger's wake.
I wondered what the ancients must have thought when the night sky came alive like this, surprising them one night as they traipsed across a high mountain ridge or nestled back against a stone to pass the night in sleep. They must have thought these winding, wandering, dashing stars were magic, miraculous, messengers, omens.
They must have thought they were blessed, I thought as I dozed off under the blanket of the twinkling night sky, my last count one-hundred-and-one.
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