Star Gazing

I'm catching up with unread magazines that piled up over the summer and discovered David Owen's article about the disappearance of the night sky in an August New Yorker.

Owen writes that terrestrial illumination of the night sky by artificial lamps have washed out our view of the stars. The Bortle Dark-Sky Scale classifies the sky along nine points. In Galileo's time the night sky across the globe would be a Class 1. Most American suburbs are Class 5, 6, or 7.

With a homemade telescope less powerful than one you'd buy an eight-year-old, Galileo described the moon's terrain, could see that the Milky Way was made of individual stars, and that Jupiter had moons (which he called planets). Most Americans have only seen the the Milky Way in pictures, yet in Galileo's day it cast a shadow over the earth on clear nights.

Today, star-gazing is nothing like it was for our grandparents. Even from the Grand Canyon -- that vast protected area -- the brightest feature on a clear night is Las Vegas 175 miles away.

I still remember the thrill of seeing a true night sky (probably a Class 4 or 5) on a clear summer night while camping on the shores of Lake Huron 11 or 12 years ago. Having always lived in cities, I didn't know that you could see satellites streak across the sky, or that there were shooting stars every night, or even that the sky held so many stars. It hadn't occurred to me that the stars on Orion's belt were just the brightest stars. Believing my eyes, I thought the stars I could see were the only stars in that part of the sky.

I know. It's crazy. Ignorance becomes a truth if it's reinforced often enough.

How impoverished our existence is without the night sky. I need the stars to remind me of my lack of consequence -- that my life, my problems are quite small. To remind me of the vastness of all I do not know. Of the mysterious heavens. It was 1992 when the Vatican officially confirmed Galileo's findings that the Earth moved around the Sun -- only 359 years after he was tried for heresy under threat of torture by the Inquisition.

In those days to look at the night sky could be dangerous because the right mind could draw unsettling conclusions about the nature of things. Nowadays, the night sky might still have something to teach us about our place in the universe -- if only we could see it.

Days of Silence, Days of Awe

My father's death has bludgeoned me into an unfamiliar silence. The days between posts feel like accusations -- days when I should have written something but didn't.

"Should."

In this unfamiliarly quiet and solitary state, I sense accusations everywhere. The dust under the beds, the dishes in the sink, letters unanswered, pounds not lost, words not found. But, of course, these "shoulds" are all my own. No one convicts me for the dust or the dishes or the letters, or the silence.

These are the Days of Awe in the Jewish calendar -- the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur -- a liminal time of introspection when Jewish tradition holds that God writes everyone's name in the book of life and decides who will live and who will die (and how) this year.

One rabbi writes that these are days to experience our brokenheartedness in a deep way as we attend to our lives and all that is done and undone, known and unknown, broken and whole.

These are days to sit in awe and silence at the great mysteries of life and death as God/the world/life announces our place in the family of things (with a nod to Mary Oliver).

Happy birthday to the whole world

The Jewish high holidays celebrate the birthday of creation and call humanity to reflect, repent, and recommit to the healing of the world. When you reflect on your life, you bump into death as well, so the holidays are also a confrontation with life's fragility and death's mystery.

On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed
On Yom Kippur it is sealed.

Here is a humorous and deep offering from Leonard Cohen

And who by fire,
who by water,
who in the sunshine,
who in the night time,
who by high ordeal,
who by common trial,
who in your merry merry month of may,
who by very slow decay,
and who shall I say is calling?

And who in her lonely slip,
who by barbiturate,
who in these realms of love,
who by something blunt,
and who by avalanche,
who by powder,
who for his greed,
who for his hunger,
and who shall I say is calling?

And who by brave assent,
who by accident,
who in solitude,
who in this mirror,
who by his lady's command,
who by his own hand,
who in mortal chains,
who in power,
and who shall I say is calling?

Transformative moments

A quotation caught my eye the other day. It's from the liner notes of Keith Jarrett's CD "Radiance" as quoted in Trinity News, a publication of Trinity Church, Wall Street.

Transformative

moments

are

very

rare,

or

they

seem

so

due

to

our

inattention.

Psalms for these days

After my father died, I found that I needed a new spiritual discipline -- something to hang each day on. In hard times, the psalms speak to the heart. So, I am in the midst writing each psalm in my own words, in my own way. These are not translations or "improvements." The biblical psalms are communal songs. They are meant for the community to sing or say. They are what they are.

I'm trying something more intimate; a dialogue with an ever-present inner companion, rather than an omnipotent God that dwells elsewhere. I'm working with the theme, imagery, or direction of the original psalm with a goal of keeping the feel of a psalm and not modern poetry.

Here's a try:

Psalm 5.

Search my thoughts and come to my aid;
I am in trouble again.

I know that if I am quiet in the morning and watch for you,
anxiety and fear cannot get a foothold.

You hold open a door and gladly I enter your house;
the heart of peace.

If only I could stay there always
in your sheltering love.

But my own mind betrays me
with anger, resentment, envy, worry, judgment.

My mind is a yawning abyss of distraction;
my thoughts swing from tree to tree when what I need most is
a clear pool of still water.

Freedom from myself, freedom from the agony of uncertainty
is what I seek;

but suffering waits inside the door.
It never knocks before coming in.

Be my shelter, Friend, for I take refuge in you;
shield me, defend me against the chatter of my own mind.

Waiting for Harry

I've been away from work for a couple of weeks now and it finally feels like vacation. I turned off the cellphone and stopped reading email for a week and started to relax. I have plowed through several Michigan mysteries and am ready for Harry Potter. I did turn on my Blackberry and glanced at the volume of email and found myself tensing. So I turned it off again.

We decided to vacation locally this year. We made our back porch into our "cottage" and have been reading, eating, playing scrabble, and hanging with the doggies. We only answer the phone if we want to and have taken some day trips (more on those later).

One concession to consumer-culture: We're bringing our girl to a downtown Ann Arbor bookstore tonight so we can be part of the Harry Potter finale. I found the sixth book difficult to get through, in part, because Harry was insufferably self-absorbed (well-done JKR, you captured some of the more disagreeable aspects of adolescence very well!). But I'm looking forward to the last book and am curious to see how JKR ends it all.

I hope you're reading for fun. It's summer, after all.

Mercy in the laundry

If you live with others, intimacy is inevitable. I mean the bodily kind of intimacy. We make sounds, take up space, and leave trails of one sort or another wherever we go.

It might be the baby brother whose non-stop crying interrupts your sleep; the little sister who tears up your homework; the closed-door argument you can't help but hear; the drunken roommate who throws up next to the bed crying about her boyfriend. The sick child who projectile-vomits onto your face. The friend who squeezes your shoulder as she walks by. Our boundaries are porous.

Growing up in a family gigantic by today's standards, I learned right away about the benefits of a closed door. For a few years I had my own room and I loved closing the door on my family. I imagined that whatever I did behind the door belonged only to me. It was my sanctuary. I even told myself that when I sang along with Cat Stevens, no one could hear me. How tolerant my family was of my own noise-making and God-knows-what else. As the eldest, I thought of myself as the tolerant one. Eldests can be clueless in this way.

It has been lovely -- and also sad -- to reestablish this strange and familiar intimacy as I've spent more time with my family these last few years. When my father was ill, he maintained his privacy and dignity around us children by calling for my mother when he needed help getting to the bathroom or had an accident. During one of our last visits, though, this boundary began to erode. He wasn't feeling well and stayed in his room for the day. We talked for a while and he began to tire. As I was leaving the room, he asked if I would empty the portable urinal. The request came so casually, he might as well have been asking me to hand him the sports section.

I took it to the bathroom and as I poured it out, my first thought was "This is weird. I'm dumping my father's urine." My second thought was, "He changed my diapers. I dump his pee. No difference." Someone will do this for me some day.

When our bodies don't work so well, we rely on each other and the boundaries we've thrown up don't make sense. When my mother's hand surgery meant she couldn't apply polish to her nails, I asked her if she'd like me to do it. She almost cried. "We haven't been this intimate in so long," said the one who nursed me.

When my sisters were visiting a while back, I developed a headache so intense I couldn't open my eyes. I laid myself down on the bed and the sister whose diapers I had changed 25 years ago rubbed my feet, touching me in a way she had never done before.

This weekend, we did some laundry for my father-in-law while visiting him in Indiana. He's very independent -- scarily so. He had a stroke a few years ago and lists to the left like a sinking ship, but is indomitable for now. Still, he needs attention and care. Laundry is one of those things he puts off since it means a trip to the basement. It is a small thing we do when we're there.

With my own dad gone, this chore took on more power than I expected. Standing in the basement and folding his underwear as I took it out of the dryer I saw that he wears the same v-neck Hanes my own dad wore. In fact, I rescued a couple before my mom gave away dad's clothes. I wear them once in awhile around the house and they're a comfort. My father-in-law is the only father I have now, and while we do not have a history of intimacy, to fold his v-necks was as much a mercy to me as a help to him. It was as if I was doing a kindness for my own father who had given me so much.

A kindness I pray I will return in time.