getting low

{This is a short little piece I wrote from my stargazing I did last week. Enjoy!}

I had only been asleep an hour and a half when my first alarm woke me at 2:45.  I woke with a start and was immediately awake. My second alarm sounded. I turned both off. It took me five minutes to remove myself from the warmth of my covers.  I pulled myself to the side of my bed. Finally I was standing, pulling on leggings, yoga pants, a long sleeve shirt and two jackets.

Complete silence ruled the house. My arms were full with blankets and a pillow. My footsteps sounded like they were amplified by a sub-woofer as I tip-toed down the stairs, even though I was wearing two pairs of socks. Thankfully a light was already on in the kitchen. I peeked at the thermometer in the window.

It was cold outside. Well, only 45 degrees. But for a southern girl, that temperature warrants gloves and hot chocolate. I soon procured both. I had set my hot chocolate ingredients out the night before. Cocoa powder, sugar, and spices mixed; milk and pumpkin measured in the refrigerator. It didn’t take long to heat and dump in a thermos.

It took two trips to get everything outside and dumped on the grass. Even with a sleeping pad I snagged from our camping stash and a picnic blanket spread over the cold ground, my pillow, and two fuzzy blankets, I was still cold. The hot chocolate helped.

I’d never seen a meteor shower before. It’s quite a sad fact when you realize that my dad is an Astronomy geek, we own a nice telescope, and we live on five acres of woods, perfect for stargazing.

I lay quite still, pressing my gloved hands together in my hoody pocket. I found Orion in the sky and what I thought (incorrectly) was Venus—one of the brightest stars in my view. I stared at the Pleiades, trying to fathom how far apart those tiny specks really were.

Then I saw the first streak. I caught my breath, almost missing it. It was so fast. At first I couldn’t tell if my eyes were playing tricks on me.

By the third streak, I knew what to look for.

Last week, a man space jumped from 24 miles above earth’s surface. He said in an interview, “Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are,”

Well, I don’t have the guts or the capability to space jump. So getting that high isn’t really an option. But here, freezing my butt off, lying on the ground in late October, I’ve found a viable alternative.

I couldn’t get high. So I got low. Above me, the stars shone and twinkled like glow-in-the-dark dots on a ceiling. I felt like I could reach up and touch them.

But I just lay there and thought about the size of each of those shining dots, about how many light years away they were. It was almost inconceivable.  A whole universe was above and before me. So huge, so glorious, so wonder-filled. And yet there I was, acting like this puny little earth and my puny little problems were all that mattered.

I had been out for an hour and a half. Getting really cold. But I was addicted. Every time I looked away from the sky, I felt like I was going to miss something. I kept my gaze fixed upward.