Stargazing was always a part of my relationship with Dean. I suppose we kind of fell into it as a habit. We met on a warm summers evening and didn’t want to say goodnight, so we walked along an empty beach under a blanket of stars. I pointed out the constellations I could remember and Dean told me that in England the moon is upside down (except to him there it looked right side up) and we both marvelled at the way the Milky Way was spilt across the sky.
In the years that followed we saw a lot of starry skies. In Australian bushland and English commons, on beaches in Indonesia, Thailand and the Phillipines and against cityscapes in Singapore and Malaysia. We saw the stars fading into sunrise on volcano tops and watched satellites dance their way over the sky in deserts. The stars became a measure of our lives. Ever stable as we changed and evolved, reminding us to keep this life of ours in perspective. Some people look at stars and feel very small in the context of the universe, but I have never had that feeling. In fact to me the sensation is entirely opposite. I feel a part of those stars, knowing that the materials in them are also in me, and in that way I am connected to them as I’m connected to everyone else on the planet in some small way. Stars, to me, are science and magic all rolled into one.
We named our son after the brightest star in the night sky, because to us he is and always will be so. Just as we spent hours gazing at the stars in evenings past, now we find we cannot draw our eyes from this little person as he grows and lives and loves. He is our new guiding light, our window into a glowing future we can only barely begin to imagine. Whatever he does in his life, the stars will be there. I’m it sure exactly what kind of person he will be, but I hope he takes the time to look at them once in a while.
No Comments