Experiencing the night sky

To experience the night sky is, for an English person, an uncertain joy; clouds may roll and obscure the most anticipated and rare of astronomical events.

Sky watchers are thus compelled to live for the moment; to be nourished by whatever happens to be - and it is never the same twice; although neither is it utterly different from previously (most of the stars are, after all, 'fixed').

Once we have discarded the materialistic frame (vast, empty, meaningless space full of condensing, clashing, exploding gases grinding-towards nothing in particular...); there is always a sense of Beings trying to communicate with the watcher, instantaneously - at the moment of observation (and not, say, many light years ago!)

This opens the mind to the simultaneity of reality; that we can think-, feel-with, know-with many Beings without space being a constraint, because each experiences a common reality.

In sum: I know that star, and that star knows me - and for a reason that is, as yet, unconscious; but which may become conscious, indeed should become conscious.

This is what draws me out, night after night; and by which I value and remember even brief flashes of sightings of some astronomical event.

For instance, this morning it was a full moon whitely back-lighting an extraordinary sky field of hundreds of aligned clouds with gaps between - and Sirius still blazing through the branches of a tree, as the sun dawned.