Stars

The natural and the spiritual have a big overlap in my perspective.

Over the last few months I've been observing the stars more.

Part of what fascinates me is that they are simultaneously something so ancient and so much a part of our everyday world.

We take them for granted, and for most of us their details & patterns of visibility go on without our awareness. (We speak about the stars moving. But this just points all the more to our self-centeredness and limited of awareness of the context of our existence. The movement is really that of the earth on which we are riding.)

How much goes on around us of which we are unaware.

What an interesting contrast between us and people of times past. They may not have know that the earth was round or the shapes the continents take. Yet I'm sure many were much more knowledgeable about the patterns of the stars, and familiar with them, than most of us are.

What an interesting connection we have to people through countless ages as we look at stars that they also observed - specific individuals, and people in general.

Such thoughts increase my sense of connection to aspects of spirituality that extend beyond my own life, beyond our own times, beyond history that we know...to reaches that we have a limited and vague knowledge of, then beyond that to reaches I can not comprehend, about which I do not know.

And yet in the midst of that I remain grounded by the physical reality of the stars that I see and the tangible, definable information that I have and continue to learn about them.

What a wonderful combination!