Look Up!
Imagine if something as simple as looking up and remembering our connectedness to each other and all things became an act of protest against those who seek to separate and exploit.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my second grade grade teacher asked our class. We were instructed to draw a picture of the thing we hoped to be in a square on the page and write the word of the thing on the line beneath the square following the phrase “When I grow up I want to be...”
This was an easy one for me. I had known for quite some time what I wanted to be.
I drew a line across the square dividing it in half. In one half I drew a stick version of myself with huge round eyes looking up at a dark sky punctured by yellow stars and a moon. On the other half I drew myself looking up at a blue sky with golden sun and fluffy white clouds.
When I grow up I want to be… “a sky watcher,” I wrote.
The teacher came around checking on our progress. “She paused at my desk. “Oh,” she said. “You want to be a meteorologist! That’s wonderful. Let me help you with the spelling. That’s a hard word.”
“Meteorologist. Yeah, that’s it!” I responded enthusiastically, thrilled that this thing I was going to be had a very official sounding title.” She wrote the word out on a piece of paper for me to copy onto my paper. I crossed out “sky watcher” and wrote “meteorologist” in the space behind it.
I was disappointed a few days later when I realize that a meteorologist was the guy on NBC who gave us the weather report. That’s not what I wanted to be. I wanted to literally just lay in the field and watch the sky. Couldn’t I do that? Was there a name for that?
I had always been bewitched, body and soul, by all that unfolded in the heavens. I still am.
I spent a good part of my childhood laying on my back at the top of a big slope out in the alfalfa field behind the barn just looking up. On summer afternoons, the two o’clock cumulous clouds ignited my imagination as the softest looking lumps of the purest white cotton took shape and slid across the sky from horizon to horizon.
I was wholly mesmerized by the tranquility of the afternoon sky. I still am.
Summer nights were often spent sleeping up on the same big slope, under the celestial bodies on full display. I would call out the familiar constellations as the ancient stories associated with them came alive in my imagination. I would also connect the unknown stars into constellations and characters of my own making.
The night sky has always been silencing and stupifying to me. In the blackness of country nights, away from city lights, the Milkyway flaunts itself across the sky from horizon to horizon with astonishing depth and clarity. It’s mystifying to consider my smallness. A brief existence on the surface of a planet pulsing with life while hurling through all this blackness within the vastness of space and time.
As I lay under the sky tears would sometimes slip down my cheeks for no reason at all and for every reason I was incapable of naming. Even at a young age I sensed I was part of something too awesome to fully grasp. A thing of magnitude and marvel. Awe and wonder. It was a deeply spiritual experience.
Meteor showers were events at our farm. The aunts, uncles and cousins would come over, set up reclining lawn chairs, pass around pop corn, pour hot chocolate from the thermos and take in these spectacular shows. Free admission.
This past weekend the aurora borealis was visible to much of the world and nearly all of the United States due to a significant geomagnetic storm. Social media was full of images. Dazzling displays of color dancing and flitting across the sky.
Everyone was looking up. Everyone was held in a moment of unflinching awe. Enchanted by raw power and beauty unfolding in animated waves across the deep blackness of night.
Vitriolic political Facebook posts were absent on this night. Divisive, dehumanizing tweets were put away as we collectively stood under the same sky, jaws hung low with murmurs of delight and wonder leaving our lips. Even those who didn’t witness it first hand were silenced by the splendor of the images as they scrolled their screens.
Something sacred was happening.
A couple months ago there was a similar event. A mass movement of people in the United States flocked to the path of totality to experience the eclipse. I wasn’t able to go, but listening to people share their experiences felt like returning to a familiar place I have been. Many talked about tearing up without being able to find the words to explain why. Others described it as a “deeply spiritual experience.”
Again, social media put out a wide flow of images and testimonies around the this shared experience.
Scenes like the following played out across the zone of totality:
Two cars parked along a quiet country road in Ohio. “Biden 2024” and “make love not war” bumper stickers slapped on a Toyota Corolla, parked next to a Chevy pick up with “Build that wall!” and “God & Guns” stickers fixed to the bumper. “Make American Great Again” capped the heads of a family picnicing in the back of the truck.
As the sky turned dark and everyone looked up, none of this mattered. It all fell away, if only for a few moments. We were one people living on one planet, circling through one solar system existing in one galaxy in an infinite sea of an unknown number of galaxies.
The tailgaters in the back of the Chevy offer sandwiches to the young couple sitting on lawn chairs behind their Corolla. They extend their arms across the separation between vehicles and accept the gift with a nod and a knowing look, locking eyes that were brimming full of emotion. Nothing is said. No words are spoken. Because what can you say? Our culture lacks words for such moments that transcend categories and labels.
Most folks, whether in the path of totality or not, paused the events of their day to step outside, flimsy eclipse glasses fixed to their face, to bear witness to the swollen moon roll through space between the earth and the sun.
Everyone was looking up. Everyone was suspended in a moment of unflinching awe.
Our collective understanding of our identity shifts, I think, when we all look up at the sky. We are no longer Republicans and Democrats in such moments. We are not Muslims and Christians and Atheists. We are not enemies. We are simply humans, in it together.
In a profound and sublime way, the sky reminds us of the truth that we are brothers and sisters, formed from the same dust of the same planet. The dust of earth. The dust of us. The dust of the stars. The dust of Divine breath.
I have been here a thousand times, I thought. Up on the slope behind the barn. An eventful night sky. An ordinary night sky. A sky in broad daylight. A sky that reminds me who I am in the midst of all this ever-shifting light and darkness.
Celestial events draw us outside, get us collectively looking up. The truth is, an ordinary uneventful sky can have the same effect of silencing us, of reminding us that everything is connected. That everything depends on everything else. That we are briefly part of something together that is enormous and wonderful and that has been taking shape for measures of time we can’t even comprehend.
There is nothing ordinary about an ordinary sky. It is always something extraordinary to behold. It is always humbling. Always grounding.
Everything is large and everything is tiny. One big galaxy, just a drop in the bucket of galaxies throughout space. One large planet, just a speck of a planet among planets. Little people scrambling on the surface of earth as it swirls through space. Small and so intricately connected to each other. Our lives are so tiny and brief, and yet we have great power to shape the moment we’re in and the planet we’re on.
We get to be part of all this. Connected to every breath and heartbeat in this galaxy and beyond. It’s astounding. It’s awesome.
While the powerful, the oppressors, the manipulators, the money-grabbers and the hoarders on our planet continue to work at instilling fear and hatred between us for their continued personal enrichment at our expense, may we never be so distracted by our perceived differences that we stop looking up and remembering the truth of who we are.
What I think is that we don’t collectively look up enough.
Imagine if we all paused our activity on a regular basis and looked to the sky. Imagine if looking up and remembering our connectedness to each other and all things became an act of protest against those who seek to separate and exploit us for their own profit. Imagine if we allowed such spiritual experiences to transform our hearts and minds. Surely this would have the power to transform the whole wide world.
May we all aspire to become sky watchers.