64°
In which I discover a place that i've always known, but never all.
Burnett Park
Archer City, Texas
6 AM
It is still pitch black out, a sky shot through with stars. I forget how beautiful it is. How is it possible to forget? I look up at it nearly every night, usually in marvel. I am constantly amazed but, like the sunset: every time it’s like the first time.
Is this a universal experience? Surely it’s a common human thing to be mesmerized by the heavens. It is estimated 25 billion humans have ever lived. Barring mental illness, I doubt a single one ever ignored the grandiose presentation present every night since man's dawn.
I recently watched the film Contact (Jodie Foster and Matthew u-gotta-keep-livin'-man,-L.I.V.I.N. McConaughey – 1993) – and I am thinking of the scene where he gallantly puts his jacket around Foster's character, Dr Arroway, at the party. She’s presenting the Occam‘s razor argument: that the simplest explanation tends to be the correct one.
She contrasts which is more likely?
An uncaring God created all this and then gave us no proof of his existence?
It all just happened and no one is out there?
To Dr. Arroway, (clearly a voice for the author Carl Sagan) it is the latter.
And I muse: How can an astronomer think there’s no proof of God’s existence? The very source of his study is all the proof I can imagine. How is that hardly possible!?!? I can't get the words out, this thought chokes me.
And in this moment of reverie, just like that, a shooting star appears as punctuation to my pontification!!
OH! God!, who is man that you remember us?!?
The problem with moments such as this is that you want to crawl into them and remain forever. But, if we go there and get stuck in time, we can no longer have more incredible moments. It’s good that we come here before dawn to the altar of creation and worshipped— then it passes.
Not a loss of majesty, but gaining of something greater—the potential of glimmers even better than the ones we're currently experiencing.
Now is a good example of that. I’m camping in a public park and a tiny town in North Texas at a writers workshop. Here I romp predawn, but I can’t walk because of the beauty. I stand awestruck. To my left is a sports field of some kind. Baseball probably. I don’t see bleachers. The stadium lights are off except for one bright source behind the field that makes the hanging haze glow.
It is inspiring.
The kind of moment from a screening of Field of Dreams or Rudy. If I’m honest with you, I’m not a sports guy and so it makes me think more of Dead poet society. Regardless, it’s quite beautiful, the backlit smoky haze.
I feel a little like the quarterback or the coach who’s gotten up before dawn on the day of the big game, having wandered down to the field to meditate on the challenges to come. We are the underdogs in this life, but we will triumph!
The gravel road in pitch black crunches soft and silent. I see that it’s not fog, but smoke from the remnants of last nights homecoming bonfire.
There is a choir of coyotes far away beyond the field of Mesquite, and this burning fire of Moria. As they quiet. Another pack further away responds.
The eastern sky is starting to brighten. Jupiter is welcoming the morning sun. My baseball field is now clearly silhouetted against the predawn. Like a ink drawing, but the light poles aren’t aesthetically placed. If an artist designed this framing, they would put the taller ones to the right, descending shorter to the left directing a viewer to the point where the sun will rise in about 20 minutes.
Golden ratios and all.
It is all so overwhelming. I slip into a reverential prayer.
Before the community is awake and I’m pouring my heart out to the unseen Power. A long tearful conversation to my God: thanksgiving, request, confession, condemnation. All the secrets we don’t tell anyone, we share with our father. My face is wet and I’m hitching a little bit. It’s all very emotional and it’s all very serious and then—
An organic rupture surprises me.
The flatulence makes me laugh because I realize: maybe I shouldn’t take myself so seriously. Maybe these things that I’m worried about, they’re really small joys that I just need to embrace.
A bird wakes up and it laughs at me.
It chirp-chirps, “Silly boy, you worry too much. Get the worm. Enjoy the worm. Look at the lilies of the field. They neither toil nor spin, and yet Jehovah has arrayed them in splendor and glory. And you too, little man, are splendid—glorious don’t worry so much.”
I sleeve away the tears and laugh. I wonder about the fire, and I wonder about the coyotes and I wonder about the love. I wonder about the ocean which I’m so very far away from. But I’m closer to it than the stars, and they are my companion constantly. I suppose the ocean is also my companion. My love is is too. And you are too.
So, I will stop borrowing worry from the future and embrace the beauty and majesty and comedy of existence. If there's one thing the early morning chorus teaches us, it is this:
Start glorious and the day will follow.
#essay #travel #workshop #writing #LMWkshp
#poetry #100daystooffset #writing
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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