Stars & Lightning
On one side, the sky was clear enough to see the stars. Their thousand-year-old light still traveling across space.
On the other side, fizzling lightning bolts flashed from thick clouds.
One side of the sky held deep clarity with pinpricks of light; the other, lit surfaces of deep and building storms.
In the middle was me at midnight: a pivot point between day and night. Standing in my pajamas in a desert whose rocks glowed red in the sunlight and dusky blue in lightning-light.
Starlight travels eons but lightning exists for fractions of seconds. They couldn’t be more opposite in their lifespans, but they can both be perceived by our eyes and the interior parts of us alert to times we should find shelter.
Dr. Carl Sagan famously said that we are made of star stuff. The implication being our foundational connectedness to the bits and bobs that make up the planets, comets, stars, and everything in between.
But we’re made of lightning too. We exist for only the briefest of seconds compared to the time of the expanding universe. We are less than a blink both as a species and as a single life. But within that life, we are made of ancient, timeless star stuff.
That night, the sky split into each. But as the wind pushed the storm across, fingers of clouds reached out to block the stars. Long enough to remind me of my temporary position on the desert ground and on the rotating face of Earth’s rock.
We exist of the oldest molecules but also for the briefest of moments. We are stars and we are lightning, both of which look different at noon and midnight.
Soon the storm was soon gone and the sky fully clear once again, letting the oldness settle back into the nooks and crannies of the sandstone and my body. To remind me how I belong to the soup of atoms rearranged into myriad forms over millennia.
To be both. The stars and the lightning.
Inspired by events in Moab, Utah, on the ancestral homelands of the Ute, Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone People.