My Stars

 

I never thought that stars were mere pinpricks of light on a black canvas hung just beyond my reach…at least I’ve convinced myself that I never thought that. I honestly believe that I have always known that stars, like the void around and beyond them, are way beyond any reach, brighter than any consciousness.

Constellations have never made sense to me, except for the Big Dipper (and the Little One, too). Growing up on American’s vast prairie lands, I learned early on how to find the North Star in an instant. And Orion: I could easily point out Orion presiding over winter’s bitter cold. But somehow I knew that those connected dots in the night sky were the product of shepherds’ imaginations fixated on that sky, imposing an order that simply wasn’t there.

The stars—individually and collectively—are brighter and bigger than all of us, out of the reach of any of us. They have their reasons.

The way I understood the stars when I was a child…was that unique to me? I don’t know, because I never asked. Perhaps once my father had said to me, Dean, the stars are giant suns millions and millions of miles away from us, and even though my brain could not really understand him, I understood it where it mattered. Same with the Milky Way…a long-shot view through to the edge of the galaxy that bears its name. It is astonishing, but the star-filled wheels of distant galaxies far outnumber and outshine it.

Maybe I believe that I always got the shine and enormity and distance of the stars right because I have always felt that almost everything is more than I am. I am a tall man, but in my head I’ve never measured up to most other people. Almost everyone else is far more important and successful and popular and all the rest than I am. Generous folks have tried to convince me otherwise…oh, you are bigger and brighter than you think…but I have always been quite sure they are wrong.

In my late teens and early twenties, I loved to sit on the front stoop of my parents’ rural Iowa home on warm summer nights and contemplate the stars and their possible intersection with the Bible and theology I was learning in school. As I sat in those stars’ silent, soulful presence, I felt more deity than I felt in reading all the words of all the books.

But then again, the words in those books helped me feel stars and be awed by them and yet not be tempted, as were the ancients, to worship them and their fellow travelers out there, beyond the firmament.

I rarely see the stars these days, blinded as I am by the lights of our human technology and impudence. I have a favorite high desert retreat where stars are as visible to me as they once were, but now it is hard for me to go there. So, I imagine the stars of my childhood and youth, and I wonder if anyone will ever grasp them for what they truly are, or how humankind fits into their eternal schemes.

I have never thought that I outshine stars.