The Direction of Intention

77.

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It is the last week of December and I am at Kit Peak observatory high atop a mountain beyond the Tucson city lights. It is late at night and I am with a group of 16 people taking turns looking through one of the many telescopes at the observatory. An astronomer acts as our guide and decides where to aim the telescope; he chooses a star cluster at the edge of our galaxy, types the coordinates into a computer and the giant telescope slowly moves into position. We move the dome by hand, slowly rotating the view opening of the building to align with the telescope.

It is my turn to look through the eyepiece. I see a ball of stars caught in a single gravitational field. The astronomer tells us that the stars slowly move within the field, stars orbiting stars. It is called a star cluster. Tears blur my eyes at the beauty of it all. I am suddenly overwhelmed with a paradoxical feeling: how small I am and how enormous my life is. Next to a star cluster some of the things we go to war over seem silly, so many artificial boundaries.

I once worked with kids in East Los Angeles who had never seen the stars. They had never been in an environment that was not constructed: never walked in a forest, never smelled the desert after the rain. They only knew concrete streets, a sun obscured by smog and artificial light at night. How could they possibly know their greatness in such a cocoon of abstraction?

It was in the night sky that humans began to recognize pattern and how the movement of the universe influences the movement of our lives – we are not separate! We’ve imagined our gods moving through the heavens and learned that we are not the center of all things. We are a speck of stardust and as vast as the night sky in our dreams and imaginations.

There is nothing ordinary about being alive and if you forget, all you need do to remember is move beyond the city lights and look into the night sky.

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