Stargazing here makes me feel a wash of humbling smallness
in the most wonderful way. Drinking in the tranquility somehow makes anxieties
and problems entirely fade into insignificance.
This momentary hiatus of human trivialities, for me, emerges
both from the aesthetic impact of a breathtaking vastness, and the romanticized
wonder that otherworldly views inspire. It is a platform to peer into a far
larger landscape.
Growing up in New York City I never
saw the stars. There were always one or two of the brightest that somehow
shined through the smoggy light-polluted atmosphere, but the night sky hardly
felt like a meditative void.
What I did have instead was
something indescribably sacred: a once-a-year sampling of the stars via an
inflatable planetarium installed in my school’s gymnasium. Starlab.
We would crawl through an external
tube into a pitch-black dome as our science teacher Rebecca softly instructed
us to lie on our backs and gaze up into the darkness.
And we would close our eyes. And
the projector was flipped on. And what transpired was pure bliss.
Rebecca would speak about the
vastness of space, telling stories of constellations and galaxies and star
systems beyond ours.
There were seams and wrinkles in the structure,
and someone undoubtedly pulled your hair in the process, but the experience was
entirely full of awe.
And yet, as with the real thing, the suspended
moment of Starlab was only ever a pause. The meditative moment was followed by a
return to the banal, as we readjusted, wide-eyed and whispering, back to into a
world of routines and reality.
In my memory this structure was
colossal, dwarfing my elementary school self.
I'm so happy that you wrote about this experience. The concept of the starlab always intrigued me, I wondered how fulfilling it would be to see projected stars instead of the real ones. One of my biggest yearnings when I'm in the various cities I inhabit is for the night sky, and I like that this was your answer to that yearning. Cool.
ReplyDeleteSamsies. So happy you finally wrote about this after hearing you talk about it all semester long. I love these kind of experiences that we carry through our lives.
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