I Revere The Nighttime Stars

I revere the nighttime stars. The stars draw me to them. I remember the clearest, biggest stars ever the night our university swing choir, on tour, stops off, circa 1974, to visit the D.H. Lawrence Ranch just northwest of Taos, NM. For some reason, that particular night sky sticks in my mind.

It's been so long ago I don't trust my memory, but I trust the stars.

We saunter off the bus and visit the small shrine to Lawrence sitting on the top of a hill. I am with a group of people I love being with, experiencing a mini-adventure together in the midst of a deepening forest.

Tall, dark-in-the-night-sentinel evergreens surround us, the smell of pine and crisp New Mexico air embrace us, and my spirit is open to those stars. At an elevation of around 8600 feet the air is crisp and light. I imagine a fireplace burning somewhere close by. I sense something greater than what I can perceive through my five senses when I look out and out to where The Great Writer puts pen to indigo sky, and as the night becomes ever blacker ever, I become endlessly connected to a vast universe sprawling beyond my conceptual capacity to take it in. It lasts just minutes, in snatches, as we walk here to there.

Forty years later I still imagine those dazzling stars stretching all across the sky like a wizard’s robe surrounding. I remember the smell of the forest infusing my soul, and feel the joy of being with fellow choir members.

Is this my memory or my imagination?

I do not know as I write tonight. Probably some of both.

Each of a billion stars seeks out just one of my cells, maybe just one atom, and resonates with it until my very body is a tuning fork humming the light song of the universe.

Is this my memory or my imagination, flitting with history forty-four years hence?

I do not know as I write tonight , sitting at a keyboard just after standing outside my suburban front door, peering through the light pollution of a mid-sized town simply to see gauze-covered bits of light.

I do not know as I write tonight where I stop and stars begin. It seems just one continuous swath I am rolled into into the into-ness.

It is a vasting. A vasting. Yes, oh yes. A vasting.

Lawrence himself wrote about this place, his ranch, “In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to the new.” It has been said that Lawrence “found his spiritual identity on the mountain”.

I don’t believe I found my own spiritual identity that night. I don't.

But I saw those stars.

“If you wish to know the divine, feel the wind on your face and the warm sun on your hand.”

From the Buddha, found in

Earth’s Echo: Sacred Encounters with Nature , Robert Hamma, p. 16)

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