Many mornings at dawn the western horizon has bands of blue, then pinkish-orange rising like horizontal stripes over Whidbey Island. At just the right time the pink hovers over the Olympics, still jagged and dark, punctuating this band of color. Then I sit and watch the coloring fade as the sun in the East starts to come up over the island and change the light, muting the colors. As it rises in the sky the sun will shine down on the Olympics, looming over Saratoga Passage and Whidbey Island, like ghosts, snow-filled crevices trickling down chocolate ice cream cones.
Sometimes I wake up on warm summer nights and go out onto my deck to look at the night sky. It has barely rained at all this summer and the clarity in the heavens has been amazing. There is also very little light pollution where I live on Puget Sound. But on one particular night, I was in for a visual delight that I had never had and probably would not have again.
“Make it zebra-like,” I always tell my hairdresser. “It’s so boring if it’s all the same color. Put streaks of white here and there to blend in with my white sides. But weave it in and out with what’s left of the dark.”
In a similar fashion, this night sky had bands of shimmering white stars, all in different widths, stretching from horizon to horizon, with the darkness of space, like my brown hair, providing the contrast to appreciate this glimmering show. When I first saw it as I sleepily sauntered out onto the deck I couldn’t quite believe it. I did a double and then a triple take. It was so stunning. I went right inside to my computer and looked up The Milky Way, and my cursory search in the middle of the night convinced me that that’s what I must have seen. I went around excitedly telling everyone that I saw the Milky Way that night.
But that’s not what I saw. With further research I learned that the Milky Way is very different from what I saw. But it was striking anyway.
Once again I’ve been fortunate enough to have the eyes to see a natural phenomenon—I’ll call it “My Milky Way”—to remember how small I am in the scheme of things. How my life and problems are absolutely insignificant when viewed next to larger more important things that have pressing consequences for the world and its population. I need to be reminded of this on a regular basis. It lifts me out of the mire of my own ego and brings me closer to the peace and serenity that I seek.
Just consider The Milky Way: a thing of beauty that we’re part of, and if we’re very lucky we might get to see it from an inside perspective. A whole new take on the world and our place in it.
Humbling.
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