Celestial Amazement

with Sandra Fees

I imagine, like me, many of you went outside soon after sunset in late January, heads tilted back, and gazed up in amazement. I hope so. Six planets aligned, four of them visible to the naked eye. This particular parade of planets won’t happen again for another 15 years.

Temperatures were in the single digits here in southeastern Pennsylvania. I’d been holing up in the house for days. Yet my husband and I felt compelled to get outside, not once, but two nights in a row to see the night sky. It seemed to us that something terribly important was happening up there, out there. In fact, something terribly important was happening. The cosmos was continuing to do what it does, continuing to be a mystical force, a place of beauty and mystery. And there we were, wandering around the neighborhood pointing and staring, trying to identify the planets—Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus!

The hours of light are already increasing, and while I’m grateful for longer days, I hadn’t realized how much I needed to look upward into the darkness. I didn’t know how much I needed to listen to the cosmos—to its silence and the whisperings of stars and planets. I’ve been trying to write about it ever since. Meanwhile, there are celestial happenings, some rather ordinary and some rather spectacular, all the time. I hope you’ll head outside some night soon and listen. Who knows what you may hear. Who knows what you might write, or when.

Yours in spirit,

Sandra