Astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson wrote movingly about mortality and the universe in her beautifully named book, A Responsibility to Awe. She writes, “Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.” These lines come from her poem, Antidotes to Fear of Death, and they inspire me to do as she does, stargaze for a while to let the light in.
“Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
‘til they are all, all inside me,
pepper hot and sharp.”
Her poem makes me think of childhood. I can almost feel the driveway beneath my back, the careless sprawl of my limbs on the ground, summer fireflies hovering, and the miracle of suburban starlight above me. Maybe my fingers are sticky from melting ice cream, and my bike lies abandoned in the curve of the cul-de-sac, and the last squeals of hide and seek are hushed. The house beckons with the porch light, the cozy light of the family room, the murmur of the tv. But first, there’s time to lay down with the stars. When you’re young.
I think if the neighbors saw me today lying out on the driveway, they would call an ambulance. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still stargaze once in awhile and wonder about the vastness of space, the marvel of sky, and the round turning marble of earth that I spin on everyday.
Once, on one of our cross country trips, we pulled in late at night to a hotel in Fort Collins, Colorado. We stood at the car, pulling out our bags and wrangling the kids. Then, something made us look up. Maybe it was the pull of a new place as if we might see a new sky. As if it might look different out west. Or maybe, we were tired of the ceiling of the car; we craved the expanse for a moment, wanted to breathe in something that seemed limitless, infinite. So, we looked up there in the parking lot and saw an orbiting light that wasn’t a star. It was moving as if it were on a track through the sky. It wasn’t a streak or a flame-out or the familiar light-blot of a jet.
Chris immediately recognized it as the International Space Station while the rest of us barely registered it. Once he pointed it out, and we watched it dangling there in space like the Enterprise itself, we were a bit awestruck. People were traveling among the stars, just hanging out in the heavens. Our Great American Road Trip suddenly seemed so dull.
A road through the stars, now that’s a trip I could never see myself taking. But I liked imagining people up there on their own journeys, discovering a new perspective which is the gift that all travel brings to the traveler.
Astronauts returning to Earth experience something called the Overview Effect, a profound change in how they see the world after seeing it from space. The astronauts’ focus is often on seeing the frontier of space, new stars and planets, but what actually astounds them is seeing their home planet from a new vantage point. This view moves many astronauts to a deeper understanding of the fragility and beauty of the earth.
William Shatner recently experienced the Overview Effect when he returned from space, overcome with emotion and revelation. He recounted the incredible experience and said that “everyone in the world needs to do this. Everyone in the world needs to see this.” He was so moved by what he saw that he wept and expressed reverence for Earth and seemed to feel an urgency to protect what we have here. Many astronauts feel this same way after they see earth floating like a miracle and displayed as one home for us all to share. A hope ignites there in the hearts and minds of these travelers as they scream through the atmosphere.
I am not sure I will be around for the era of space tourism which may render my road trips obsolete. But I can appreciate how a trip can change the way we see things, how it expands our view of the world, collapses boundaries, and inspires us to protect the lands and the history of our world for future generations.
The sky out west is not so different from the sky above my house in the east. But sometimes in my daily life, I forget to look up. The routines of life keep my head spinning. After our encounter in Colorado looking up at the night sky and with the poet’s reminder to eat the stars, I am thinking more about the astronauts and the International Space Station. Chris now has an app on his phone that alerts him when the International Space Station is traveling past our area.
One day recently, we took our youngest son to a late soccer practice, and we got the alert that the space station was coming our way. There in the middle of our life, just a plain day in the week, we looked up like we did in Colorado. The darkening sky illuminated a moving house of astronauts who I thought might be looking down at me with wonder. We exchanged our gazes of awe and heeded the command of the poet.