Dear Shannon,

You are but a speck.  Tremble before my vastness.

Complete neutrality,

The Universe


Had an exhausting and surreal weekend camping at the Table Mountain Star Party.  Wednesday and Thursday nights were spent gazing up at the kind of sky you see in movies, deep blue velvet thick with stars and embellished with an arc of Milky Way so thick you could almost reach up and scoop it with a spoon.  The telescope viewing was amazing, globular clusters, nebulae, open clusters, Saturn with rings and moon, but my favorite part was lying on a sleeping bag looking up, catching early Perseids and ISS passes, and losing myself in the vastness.  Somewhere along the way, I started singing, and wrote these words for a new verse of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The tune is the embellished variation that I like to sing, so unfortunately it won't scan to the simple melody that everyone knows.

Blazing giant in the night,
But so very far away you look small to my sight.
Hydrogen and helium you burn to make much more,
It's the very stuff of life that swirls within your core.
Twinkle Twinkle  Little Star,
I'm made of the very same stuff that you are.

The next two nights were a less pleasant reminder of nature's power, though no less awesome.  Friday night brought a thunderstorm of a magnitude we never see on this side of the Cascades.  The lightning strikes were numerous and close enough to require that we seek more substantial shelter than our tent.  The sky opened up and rain fell so heavily that we couldn't hear over it.  Morning came with sun and clear skies, and washed out roads and flooded tents. Saturday night the winds came and blew for hours.  Winds so strong that our canopy was blown over our tent and across the fields.  Our tent was being lifted off the ground even with over 500 lbs of humans in it.  Morning came, again with sun and clear skies, and the discovery that most of our tent stakes had been pulled up, and the rain fly had torn.  Still, our tent was there, and we were safe.   Safe and utterly insignificant on a universal scale.

I am a speck.  I am utterly insignificant in this endless expanding Universe, a mere dot of life, on a mere dot of a continent, on a mere dot of a planet, in a mere dot of a solar system, in a mere dot of a galaxy.  We live on such a small scale.  Isn't that beautiful?