Lately, I have been spending a portion of nearly every evening stargazing in my backyard. There is a beautiful quality of light that graces the Texas sky come 8 p.m. Reclining on an old down comforter, I meditate on the movement of the clouds or the clarity of the sky or the motion of the trees or the flight pattern of hawks. Inside, my dishwasher hums, my children brush their teeth, my cats howl for more food. But outside, I am a student of the cosmos.
And I pray.
I’ve found these outdoor conversations with God particularly meaningful of late. On Easter eve, I spent nearly two hours on that blanket, first talking, then listening, then thinking, then dozing off a bit. I didn’t achieve a momentous epiphany, nor were any earth-shattering answers found in the gnarly branches of the giant oak under which I had spread the comforter, but I felt at peace.
I can’t help but whisper this Walt Whitman poem (from the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass) to myself during my nightly star communions, because I think his sentiment is perfectly expressed in memorable simplicity.
And like Whitman, I have increasingly found solace in these moments when I wander off by myself and tiptoe into something mystical, when I put the book down or shut off the laptop or unhand my iphone, place my finger to my lips and silently be.
Or as Brother Whitman so eloquently describes the experience:
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
So beautiful – thank you.
Loved this post! Thank you for sharing your experience. I need to gaze more….
Lovely. I’ve been enthralled with Jupiter this year, especially when it was so close to Venus and the moon.
What you say resonates with me on a deep level. In the LDS tradition there is a tendency to share only spectacular spiritual experiences, First-Vision-like moments, rather than share the more mundane cultivation of the spiritual in the every day, forgetting that here is where we meet the mystery of our beautiful existence.