Patterns of Dying Suns
Finding Courage in an Unfamiliar Cosmos
When I look up at night, I see an unfamiliar sky. The big dipper is swapped for the Southern Cross. I exhale. There is more world here. A disruption to my planetary orientation does not agitate, but calms meeting a deep ache that what we see not determine what will be fate. The celestial seascape roams my body. I am patterns of dying suns. We are the human eyes spun in wonder to perceive them. It is the darkness that gives shape to the light at all. Breathing in sky, I remember I am never lost. Exhaling stars, I know it is in surrender we can make new constellations. Even space has sovereignty. The Earthly encounter shimmers on a far-off desert. A lake reflects a new moon. Empty. Silvery light drips across mountains of sand.
I was walking through a jungley evening in the northeastern state of Maranhão, Brazil, recently when the chorus of the frogs and the texture of the wind through the palm leaves turned my attention upwards. I did not recognize this sky.
The big dipper is swapped for the Southern Cross.
Of course, I have seen the heavens from the Southern Hemisphere many times, but that night, it arrested me. The sky is one of the steadiest patterns we have in our human rhythms.
The sun will always rise.
The moon will reliably wax and wane in predictable cycles.
Even while much falls apart here on Earth, the sky is our steady witness, our grandfather and grandmother holding watch and loving attention over it all.
But when we look to what gives us steadiness and it’s not what we expect, what then?
I tracked my response from awe to intimacy to something even deeper. The sky reminded me it is not fixed predictability that provides safety, but rather that change, which of course the sky is forever enduring, is indeed closer to the pattern of what it is to be human.
There is more world here.
Standing beneath the yawn of the sky’s unfamiliarity, unpredictability and newness was not startling in its nourishment.
For we need newness now.
I do not want things to stay the same. A world in which carbon emissions are destroying our home, communities of people are getting their rights stripped away, wars continue on without end and millions are at risk of starvation, malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS due to recent foreign aid cuts.
We need something new.
meeting a deep ache that what we see not determine what will be
I had been feeling so discouraged, so heartbroken and so achy over policies that would destroy or threaten the Earth and the quality of life of all of us, that the new sky met my longing for hope.
The cosmos seemed to say: do not give up on what you do not yet see.
The cosmos also seemed to say: what will you do to be part of the new? Are you willing?
The new is not a binary to the old. The new is an entangled expression of radically just futurities that are still possible. We are strung to the stars as the night presses its lips to push back the day. Nature needs us all to do our part in that unfolding horizon.
Breathing in sky, I remember I am never lost. Exhaling stars, I know it is in surrender we can make new constellations.
That night, my part was opening my body and softening my heart to the sky. And giving thanks for the blessing of being remembered to an unfamiliar pattern.
A pattern of regeneration, enduring possibility, and courageous collaboration. These are the patterns of nature. And these are the patterns in us too.
May you find beauty in the unfamiliar. May you find nourishment. May you seek out your version of an unknown sky. And may you not lose contact with the new that is constantly finding its way to the surface.
Especially now, in Spring time, when nature gifts us with the sensual remembrance of all that is still possible. Of all that is not yet lost.
In newness,
Lindsay