One Among the Stars - Aug 14 2024

 

One Among the Stars

Aug 14 2024

English has no word

for what I can only call

that moment of ecstasy

when you cease to be;

leave your body

are no longer yourself.

Cease to be,

but not extinguishment, as in death;

which, after all, has many words

to soften it.

But rather, that moment of transcendence

when a clear night sky

opens overhead

and swallows you whole.

Like the time

you stood outside

in the great sand desert

or on a mountaintop

and simply took in the sky,

its vast black dome

impossibly thick with stars

all the way down

to the edge of the world.

More and more

the longer you looked.

When you felt like an astral traveller

riding the planet

as if hitching a ride.

When the earth

shrunk to a small round ball

before falling away,

leaving you weightless

in infinite space.

Which is it exactly,

that moment

your boundaries dissolved

and you were one among the stars.

And when, ever after

you felt a release,

a peace

you never knew before.

How, like the fatalists you’d always scorned

you felt your burden of worry

melt away;

content

to surrender

any pretence of control.

Because, for the first time

you realized how small you were

how inconsequential.

Because you understood

how every cell of your body

belonged to the universe,

would persist

in one form or another

for as long as anything was.

And because you’d experienced flight;

slipping gravity

and shedding your container,

a disembodied spirit

expanding ever outward.

Isn’t it odd

how this humbling enlarges you?

How, when you feel at your smallest

you’re at one with the cosmos?

Surely German

has a compound word for this,

some tongue-twister

that’s fun to say.

But for us

I suppose transcendence

does well enough.

To overcome.

To rise above.

To catch a glimpse of the sublime.

How all it takes

is a clear night

and stopping to look up.

And how, from that moment on

you’re never yourself again.

I have the feeling I’ve already written this. And not just once! So, if you plagiarize, is it OK if it’s yourself?

Still, sometimes it takes a few go’s to get it right!