Stars

You can reach up and touch the stars. They can feel so close that all the possibilities of the world are within your reach, that if you wanted you could turn slightly and shift between worlds on the back of a speck of dust, in the blink of an eye.

The stars have inspired humanity for millennia, only losing their influence now due to the fact we can't see them anymore through the light pollution common to humanity. Societies imagined diagrams linking the various stars, inventing powers that were said to influence us in our day to day lives, and then using those pictures to navigate the world. Even when we were exploring Earth we looked up at those celestial bodies and wondered. Now the stars are all that are left to explore, if we can only get there.

One of the fascinating things about stars, the suns of far off solar systems, is that they aren't really there anymore. The distances are so fast that even light travels for hundreds and thousands of years to reach our eyes and the stars we perceive are merely shades of what used to be, that have transformed and moved across the sky far from where we think they are. The astronomical reality is that the planet spins on its axis, the planet also rotates about the sun, the solar system is ploughing around the galaxy and the galaxy has its own motion. The sky is constantly changing but on so slow a timescale that we see nothing happen. Even the axial wobble that is going to lead to the North Star no longer being the North Star occurs on a cycle twenty six thousand years long.

Despite all the astronomy and the science and the navigation the stars are still romantic. You can, if you have the opportunity, go out there and gaze up at the sky and think about your true love, or the massive and wonderful world, or compose poems of intense cheesiness for your own satisfaction. You can go out there and wonder, wonder at the immensity of space and the possibilities of whatever might be out there. Those are all incredibly romantic things, and maybe that's why people don't talk about them any more. Maybe the stars being hidden by excess light is a perfect incidental complement to the cynicism of the world that shuns romanticism. We hide the emotional truth by excessive illumination. Such irony!

We can still do it though. We can wonder and think and dream. It's all possible if we can only see.

O.

Note: Some potential for disruption in the Quirky Muffin as I visit Nottingham for a few days. Here's hoping it works out anyway!