stars

The apparition

/ Fran Haley / 9 Comments

I can’t sleep.

Don’t know why. Not anxious or worried. No thoughts churning.

After an hour or two of tossing and turning, I give up.

I toss the covers, grab my robe (plush emerald green, floor-length, with a hood; wearing it makes me feel like an ancient Celt).

Don’t need to turn on the hallway lights. There’s already light. Thin and silvery, from the blind-occluded windows. The moon is waxing. Hunter’s Moon and supermoon in the making, the biggest and brightest of the year.

The heat comes on for the first time this season. New HVAC system hardly makes a sound. Just the faintest hum.

Don’t know why I peek through the blinds of the kitchen window, toward the east. Habit? Curiosity? Expectancy? This is where I recently saw the nutria, a thing I never saw before, out in the yard by the birdbath. In daylight, though. What should be here in these predawn hours?

No creatures, but the stars above are spectacular.

Mars and Jupiter are easy to spot. Orion’s belt, three brilliant rhinestones. Sirius, the Dog Star, brightest of all, seems to be calling…

The pull is immense. 2:15 a.m. is too early to be so wide awake and far too early to be outside, but why not go see what I can see?

I turn on the back deck light for moment to be sure no creatures are afoot (say, a nutria, a skunk, a coyote; granted, I’ve not seen the latter in my backyard, but they’re known to be around).

No creatures. I switch off the light and slip out into the chilly stillness, glad of my heavy robe.

The moon peeks through the tops of tall pines. If it were not obscured, I could read a book by its silver-white radiance.

For a minute I play with my Skyview phone app, identifying constellations and stars with which I am not so familiar (Procyon, in Canis Minor; its name means before the dog. I like this. I’ve been trying to convince my husband to get a puppy since Dennis the dachshund moved out with our newlywed son).

Then I just listen. The night is so still about me. Close. Hushed. Breathless. Again that word comes to mind: Expectancy. In the distance, the low hooting of an owl.

Right about then is when I see movement above the trees in the eastern sky. Something gliding from the south.

A pale outline, conical, almost like the nose of a blimp. That’s my first thought: Blimp.

I can only see the nose. The rest is shrouded.

White-veiled, ethereal, sailing northward above the horizon… a giant ghost ship navigating the sky.

—What am I seeing?

I manage to shoot a quick video:

I want to follow it, to see where it goes, but it’s quickly gone.

I need to know.

Back in the house, I start researching comets. Surely that’s what this is? I have never seen anything like it. The video doesn’t capture the enormity of it nor its spiritlike quality.

Turns out that comets are predicted this week. In astronomy, their sighting is referred to as an apparition. Fitting. This apparition doesn’t seem to match the descriptions I’m reading. I learn that there’s supposed to be an Orionid meteor shower caused by the tail of Halley’s Comet in a few days, but the comet itself isn’t supposed to be visible again until 2061.

The universe plays by its own rules. Dances to its own inner tune. I missed the aurora borealis last week, the northern lights flinging their colorful fringes this far south, and I was saddened. One day, I’m determined, I shall see them in all their wild, diaphonous glory.

For the moment, I’ll be trying to solve the mystery of the heavenly body I saw on this cold, still morning when I could not sleep and was drawn to the exact spot at the exact time to witness its appearing.

Awed to my very bones.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
(my experience this morning reminds me that writing is also about
showing up to see what comes)

Stargazing

/ Fran Haley / Leave a comment

The Boy and I
are stargazing
with our SkyView
phone apps

reading names:

Dabih

Mirzam

Capella

Aldebaran

Taygeta

Elnath

Tien Kwan

Betelgeuse

Fomalhaut

Altair

Vega

Deneb

the Pleiades

—makes me remember
that God knows all the stars
and calls them by name
I tell The Boy.

His face is turned up
toward the glittering heavens

after a long moment
he speaks:

I wonder what names
they are.

—Me, too, Boy.

He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. – Psalm 147:4

Of stifling, stories, and stars

/ Fran Haley / 5 Comments

What stifles you?

This question appeared today on Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog.

The first thing the word stifle conjures for me is heat—stifling southern summer afternoons, air turning to bathwater.

Hard to breathe.

Which makes me think of COVID-19.

And masks.

It’s hard to breathe with a mask, if you have to expend much energy, if you have to talk very much… I know, because I wear one when I’m out and about.

In thinking of masks, I come to another layer…

Filters.

There to help protect. To keep harmful stuff out.

Or in. Depending.

Masks may be somewhat stifling.

Filters aren’t stifling at all.

It’s the lack of filters I find stifling, out there in the daily atmosphere, the zeitgeist of our times. Words of fire, of ash, of acid rain, meant to destroy…when their creative power could be harnessed instead to edify, to transform, to transcend. To honor. To heal. The poets know it…

I can only be vigilant with my own filtering. With what I let into my own mind, heart, and soul. With what I let flow in return… recognizing that

Fear stifles creativity
Inner critics stifle courage
Loudness stifles contemplation
Turmoil stifles contentment
Excuses stifle commitment
Regret stifles today—and tomorrow

—I’d like to continue the acrostic with a sort of reversal using each letter of “stifle” and “filters” on every line but I am tired now. Tiredness stifles the brain.

Humanity is stifling. As in, one’s own. Today an education colleague and I joked that we were done with Earth, having had enough of not-knowing, of virtual realities of teaching, of the inability to move forward with life in general and the tolls taken on us all in so many ways. We kidded about going to live on the Space Station. Even now, recalling, I am “slipping the surly bonds of Earth,” as WWII fighter-pilot-poet John Gillespie Magee wrote, to circumnavigate our planet every ninety-two minutes, seeing fifteen sunrises and sunsets in one day, like the astronauts do. To be among the stars…

Which evokes another favorite quote, this one from Muriel Rukeyser:

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

And so I slip away from the cosmos, down through our protective atmosphere, back to my own country, to my home, my family, my little spot carved out here in the kitchen, to the waiting keyboard, feeling again the heaviness of humanity.

For us all.

For our very atoms, for the stories we live and breathe.

I reach for the words and it’s a little like reaching for the stars. Not those beyond but their remnants within; as scientists say, we humans are made of stardust.

Well then.

Seems we should be about filtering light.

I’ve enjoyed the open community of writers over at Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog. If you write (or want to write) just for the magic of it, consider this your invitation to join.