Tag Archives: astronomy

I Have Loved the Stars

9 Replies

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

– Sarah Williams, “The Old Astronomer to His Pupil”

gloaming

This moment happened on my deck tonight.  I’m grateful I got to witness it.  I was sitting still with a glass of wine and dinner in the oven. The first word that slipped into my mind was “gloaming.”  That’s the tiny sliver of time between sunset and night.

Star light, star bright,
first star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
I wish to have this wish tonight.
 

I’ve got this wish that I’ve been working on for a year.  In February, this blog will be one year old.  It feels like something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and I’m finally doing it.  Now I want to set some goals and own them.

Goal #1:  1000 Facebook followers

Terribly close on this one.  788 at last count.

Goal #2:  100,000 page views in a year

Striking distance on this one.  Last count was around 76,000.

So, I’m owning it.  Expressing my dreams has always felt like a risk, as if dreams must be pounced upon instead of worked on diligently.  But I can either focus on the stars or dwell on the darkness.

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you
 

I’m nervous about this goal.  It’s time to make a plan.  When I think about the dream, I see the star in this picture–the thing that keeps me looking up.  When I think about actually getting there, I think about the river that’s in the picture, invisible in the dusk.  It’s the thing that changes the landscape through persistence, not sheer power.

Shine On, Shine On

11 Replies

Harvest MoonI woke up this morning to a strange golden light coming in through my window.  Carlos and I stepped out on the deck to see what we could see.  His tiny bare toes tiptoed across the chilly dew-covered boards then stopped.  He looked up in the sky to the harvest moon.  His perfect little mouth curled into a smile then he whispered, “WOW!”

Yes, Baby Carlos Punkin…Wow. 

What a perfect word to start the day…WOW.  Even in his less than three years, he’s already seen the moon a hundred times.  But he reminds me to delight in it, to see it.  Sometimes it is so easy to forget to see the things we look at every day.  

Vivi asks me questions.  She reminds me to wonder and to investigate.  I love living in this age of Google when I can say, “Let’s look it up!”  Here’s what she and I talked about when we talked about the moon.  “Are other people seeing this moon, too?”  We found this really cool image from EarthSky.com:

Day and night sides of Earth at the instant of the September 2013 full moon (2013 September 19 at 11:13 Universal Time). Notice that dawn is coming to the U.S. while night is falling in Asia when the September 2013 moon reaches the crest of its full phase. Image credit: Earth and Moon Viewer

Day and night sides of Earth at the instant of the September 2013 full moon (2013 September 19 at 11:13 Universal Time). Notice that dawn is coming to the U.S. while night is falling in Asia when the September 2013 moon reaches the crest of its full phase. Image credit: Earth and Moon Viewer

I love having all these little minds around; they remind me to look, to ask.  To wonder.