Before Dark

We live in a spectacular moment of time, a fraction of a fraction of a second on the face of the cosmic clock, when we are so purely privileged to be able to see with our own eyes the wonderous, brief sweep of the universe, its billion-spiraled arms whirling out across unimaginable distances, its colors burning from the same metals and inks that dye our blood and hue our eyes, the seemingly impossible made bright like a child’s spattered painting, made all the more sublime by the random wonder of it all.

As a child I learned the brightest constellations on summer nights with my mother out on the porch above the lake, practiced them as I lay on the ice that winter, as I drove across the desert years later, as I’ve traced them out for my own son and daughter half a lifetime later.

It won’t always be this way – in fact, we are already moving, imperceptibly, toward an eternity of dark nights full of nothing but the purest void, all – all – the stars having fled too far away for their meager light to reach us, the galaxies moving ever further and further away, receding like the hint of some possible memory from a childhood largely forgotten and now wondered if wholly imagined...

But we were here once, and we saw; marveling, we watched with widened eyes as the night filled with layer upon layer of light and movement.

It is not that long before dark – come find me again if you can, where once we looked up as one, where time and place were forgotten amid all the speckled splendor of something that seemed improbably and exactly meant to be.

And I will be there, waiting, though you may hear only the high desert wind…