Under Same Skies

I'd like to tell you that it started when I was a child, sitting at the dinning room table while my mom rolled out astronomy maps in dusky blues. Or in the early years of dating my beloved when we would lay in the park and I'd weave tales about the constellations into the dark, not yet knowing that storytelling was in my lineage. But it started long before me, or you, or any family listed neatly on the tree. It started with our Ancestors, their eyes held by that ancient light, recording seasons, mapping stories, finding comfort, understanding magic. These same skies, that same guiding light, led them home, just as they're leading us too.

I can't stop star gazing.  I think it was those hot summer nights, watching the moon set and red giants glow, while we camped our way through the interior West, that rekindled that fire.  I know it's the nightly episode of Cosmos wherein my heart expands at the thought of how vastly connected we are, down to our molecular level, to the earth, to the stars, to each other.  It's the incredibly synchronistic ties between ancient cultures storytelling the constellations into life.  It's the idea that humanity has always, from our first breath, gazed up in wonder.  When I stand in the dark and find my celestial bearings, scanning the sky for those clusters I know by heart, I feel the ripple of ancestry.  Of those whom I can thank for my DNA who stood under these same skies, drinking in starlight until their neck strained from the fullness of the heavens.

I think to myself, if we hold the same elements as the stars, the same bits of carbon and iron and oxygen, then so does everything else we touch on this earth.  Even this silver, that I weave into story and tribute, contains actual stardust.  And that, I tell myself, must be why it glows.

Don't ever stop stargazing, because the wonder of those great balls of light resides in you.