Stressful faces. Commuter races. Last-minute compartmentalized parking spaces. Local traffickers faithfully discharge their duties, laying their burdens down in the retail emporiums and mail order altars of our brave new times. Store managers cheerfully, yet frantically oblige in return for our paperwork. Our personal orbits overshadow the undisturbed motions of the mechanical solar system.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year again. Wheels are turning, and wallets are burning — you can almost lose your mind. What would, I muse, a homesick extraterrestrial expedition glean and gather from the wigwagging of holiday life upon the third rock from the Sun? It’s time to take stock of our stockings after all. Where are the borders of our lives?
The last few evenings offered solace to you, namely Aroostook Skies. A nearly full moon lit up the starry vault with a reminder that all that glitters isn’t plastic. The glowing ground accepts the loveliness from above, a holiday gift unmatched for the weary wanderers chained to our commercial commitments. Salvation speaks in the silver dollar disk above. It’s time to listen rather than watch the Moon. It’s just there! A fantastic voyage to a calming light source, freely bestowed from 240,000 miles away. The voice of the Moon is a call to the heart while time remains.
Forty-three years ago, three men in a tiny ship saw that light first-hand. The crew of Apollo 8 circumnavigated the Moon to the unforgettable and Great Society of America in the 1960s. Let the mission of Borman, Lovell and Anders help set our own navigation aright.
Another timely touch comes from neighbors in Indonesia who, the night of December 10th and 11th, witnessed the most recent spectacle in nature’s palette: a total lunar eclipse. The dance and interplay of time and motion prevented us in the County from participating in that show. Consult the Internet for details until you, yourself, may abruptly interrupt your own silly Xmas dance. Consult your iTouch calendar and plan, now, to sway to the eclipsed Aroostook evening scenery of April, 2014. Still, why should such a lunar transformation three years hence jar our better sensibilities to the awe and curiosity of lunar light tonight? Perhaps that’s the price our modern minds must pay at the celestial counter.
So, here’s a far faster medicine to soothe your soul. Please heed and hear from a educational goldmine called Keeper of the Night, the appeal of an ancient son of the Earth:
“Overhead, on any night when the moon is nearly full, you make awake from a dream and look at the sky to see cottony cumulus clouds drifting across the face of cool light beaming down. Over the millennia Native peoples of North America have been moved by this vision, framed by a sky spangled with stars and planets. There is something about the night sky that touches a place deep inside, connecting us to all who have stood in the darkness and gazed at the sky dome. Perhaps it is a feeling of awe — one that humbles and puts us in our place — that brings us closer to those who have been similarly touched by a reverence for nature’s vastness. Here is a reminder of our place on the Circle of Life, or our roots in the cosmos, of being a part of something far beyond understanding. The Great Mystery.”
So let’s wake up, even as Jack Skellington finally succeeds, from the nightmare before Christmas before it’s too late to see or hear the simple and the free. And that gift will set us upon the road less travelled; miles to go before we finally earn a well-deserved sleep.
Larry Berz is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
