Sky Secrets
A Note About Noticing Stars
The way one can live in a place for years and still notice new wonders about it…
Last night, I noticed for the first time that I can look DOWN and see stars from my front porch. I’ve always thought of them as being above… but here, living at the level of the sky, the horizon just sits lower than anywhere else I’ve called home.
The catching of the glint of starlight, noticing that the angle of my eye was lower than level, it was suddenly apparent. A scene I’ve reviewed so many nights before, and yet, never quite this way.
Startling. Exciting somehow, feeling that I’m high enough to see beyond the horizon—which I am of course not, but from this vantage point, I begin to wonder how many stars would be out of sight from the Red Desert, a plateau that begins just a thousand feet below us and only a few miles away.
It’s a feeling reminiscent of other nights spent at altitude, in high mountain basins, also looking down to see stars. An experience I had assumed was reserved for those “special” mountaintop expeditions. How could a life lived in the clouds, among the stars surrounding one’s visible sphere, every single day, even exist?
And yet, it does. It has been so all along. What an unexpected exhilaration.
The most profound shifts in perspective can come from the seemingly simplest observations. Every time I feel I’ve noticed it all, something new is waiting.
It’s as though the mountain reveals its secrets only when it feels you’re ready for them. Of this, I’m surer every day.