"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star"--Fredrich Nietzsche
Winter. Stars. Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
I was surprised at the experienced magnitude of the heavens on a recent trip across the wild northern reach of my state. Remote stretch of unploughed blacktop that sliced through cedar and pine. A covering of white snow blanketing everything. Completely. Contrasting the total blackness of the sky. The space between our planet and the heavens devoid of all the lights of man's marques and house lights and glowing computer monitors. Even my dashboard lights would not work this night, flickering on and off and on and off until I turned them off to halt the flickering. I plunged ahead in a ebony cockpit. Distant suns, our stars, piercing their light at this dark that surrounded them. Long stretches of nothing but the black of the sky, with its violent glow of stars. Their light being thrown at the earth, at my eyes.
It looked like beautiful chaos to me. No pattern, only white, static, turbulence. I know that there must have been cosmic planetary motion, but I could not detect it. Motion so far away from me that it could not be spotted by my vision.
And something was changing in me. I felt as if I had aged. Not years or days or hours, but lifetimes. I felt my soul was suddenly old and wandering. It danced away from my body briefly. I felt tuned to ancestral connections. I felt as if time had suddenly stopped. It was as if I was laying in the snow, cold rising through from below and stars warming from above.
It returned, my consciousness, with a strange hint of recognition that it could understand the surrounding chaos. Briefly. And then that feeling was gone, cold creeping back like hands pulled from a warming blaze. Lost.
But in that moment I recognized my own mortality and immortality. Why two similar words that really hold the same meaning? They were the same. They ended at the same place, in the same state.
Dust. But a beautiful, though distant stardust, in the eyes of those who would remember.
"I cannot stop the thought,
Winter. Stars. Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
I was surprised at the experienced magnitude of the heavens on a recent trip across the wild northern reach of my state. Remote stretch of unploughed blacktop that sliced through cedar and pine. A covering of white snow blanketing everything. Completely. Contrasting the total blackness of the sky. The space between our planet and the heavens devoid of all the lights of man's marques and house lights and glowing computer monitors. Even my dashboard lights would not work this night, flickering on and off and on and off until I turned them off to halt the flickering. I plunged ahead in a ebony cockpit. Distant suns, our stars, piercing their light at this dark that surrounded them. Long stretches of nothing but the black of the sky, with its violent glow of stars. Their light being thrown at the earth, at my eyes.
It looked like beautiful chaos to me. No pattern, only white, static, turbulence. I know that there must have been cosmic planetary motion, but I could not detect it. Motion so far away from me that it could not be spotted by my vision.
And something was changing in me. I felt as if I had aged. Not years or days or hours, but lifetimes. I felt my soul was suddenly old and wandering. It danced away from my body briefly. I felt tuned to ancestral connections. I felt as if time had suddenly stopped. It was as if I was laying in the snow, cold rising through from below and stars warming from above.
It returned, my consciousness, with a strange hint of recognition that it could understand the surrounding chaos. Briefly. And then that feeling was gone, cold creeping back like hands pulled from a warming blaze. Lost.
But in that moment I recognized my own mortality and immortality. Why two similar words that really hold the same meaning? They were the same. They ended at the same place, in the same state.
Dust. But a beautiful, though distant stardust, in the eyes of those who would remember.
"I cannot stop the thought,
I'm running in the dark..."
--Pearl Jam, from the song "Immortality"
--Pearl Jam, from the song "Immortality"
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