Sans Fig Leaf
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"Brightly shining"
21 December, 2006
There are many things I love about living in the city, from the shallow (all-night grocery stores, employment prospects), to the more important (multiple live theatre companies, civil rights ordinance that includes me). But one thing I really miss about living in small towns far, far from any city is the night sky.
Yes, we can still see a few stars and the moon on a clear night, but so many of the stars are washed away by the glow and thousands of street lamps, headlights, porch lights, and so on. Even more than the stars, I miss the darkness. In the city the night sky between the stars is never black: it's a very dark blue.
The stars we can see just don't seem like real stars on the blue background. I can never completely shake the feeling that it isn't the sky above me, but a dome or a false ceiling that someone has hung some twinkle lights on. I think it's because I spent so many hours as a kid laying under the night sky on a summer night.
Doing that, out far from a city and it's light pollution, it was easy to imagine what a tiny speck I was, clinging to the surface of a spherical rock spinning along its orbit in the vastness of the universe. It was hard to feel arrogant while looking up into that abyss.
Each of us is but a traveller in creation: one tiny part of an unimaginably huge and complex system.
Some people find that thought depressing. I don't. Humbling, yes, but not depressing.
Because I am part of that great creation. A tiny part? Perhaps, but stop for a moment and think about each of the other parts of the same creation. Our sun, for instance, is billions of times as huge as any of us. Yet, compared to the great expanse of the universe, it is the tiniest of tiny specs. The same is true for galaxies, groups of galaxies, and any other object you could name. Compared to the total universe, they are no more significant that any of us.
And we are, likewise, no less significant than any galaxy.
--Og Mandino
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