Of Heaven and Earth

I spent this past long weekend celebrating the holiday with my extended family. We gather once a year around this date, coming in from all over the country, settling into a string of homes along the northern coast of Maine, a bit off the beaten track. It's one of my favorite places on earth and being there with the people I grew up with, my tribe, makes it all the sweeter.

At night, if you take a moment and walk a few yards away from all the festivities and into an open field, you can lie down on your back and view the most amazing display of stars, something we rarely see from the more populated areas where we all tend to live nowadays.

In truth, we really can't fathom the scope of the universe, the dance of stars contained within and all their magnificent gyrations. Science tells us that we are constantly being bathed with many forms of radiation from these distant bodies, but it's the limitation of our senses that registers them only as twinkling points of light. Still, this seemingly random scattering of luminescence has inspired us, awed us, and led the poets, artists and dreamers of our cultures to create wondrous works of infinite depth. We're only seeing a small piece of the sky's true beauty and yet look at what we can do with it.

When we reach out to each other, when someone comes within our sphere of notice, when they start to mean something to us, we only see a small piece of that person, a minute portion of the radiation of their true spirit. At times we have to remember that it's our own limitations, our own, only too human, set of senses that are not allowing us to truly realize that other person.

And much like scientists, there are those that proclaim, when dealing with people, there is more you need to know, more characteristics to be gleaned, a theory of why this and why that that has to evolve and at length when enough information is gathered you can finally expel an "I understand" and go forth. Only then will you let someone into your life. But the poet, the artist, the dreamer within tells us: what I see is enough to work with; my own senses, limited as they are, provide for me enough that I may create and in doing so join spirits. Just as the heavens inspire us, so too should we be inspired by those we love. Let's just lie back and enjoy the dazzling display of each other.