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The psalmist writes:
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
In our Anglican liturgy, we sometimes use these words:
At your command all things came to be:
the vast expanse of interstellar space,
galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses,
and this fragile earth, our island home...
Above mankind’s creation, our un-fragile concrete and steel and glass, our highways in constant motion, our artificial lights, I watch the movement of the heavenly bodies, the passage of the clouds, the ever-changing weather.
On bright hot days, I sometimes think of Apollo, the Sun God, driving his chariot pulled by fiery horses.
The Inuit have a story in which the Sun and Moon are a brother and sister, constantly chasing each other across the sky.
In writing the sky in my sketchbook, like a diary, I think I am trying to bear witness to something much larger than we are, something we’re unlikely or unable to destroy. What could be more eternal than the sun, the moon, and the stars? What could be more ephemeral than the changing sky, and yet, more constant?
Does some part of us endure in the seeing, in our witnessing? Is that why we look up at night, and keep looking longer, our unknowing filling the black spaces between the tiny points of light?
Or is it a way of feeling connection across both distance and time?
The psalmist’s words come to us from the time of King David, but my moon is the same as his. My planets, the same heavenly bodies whose motion fascinated ancient astronomers in the calm dark skies of Persia.
Tonight I will see the same moon as a child in Gaza, an old man in Isfahan, a solitary rider in the American west.
It’s the same moon I saw as a young child, and see now, in my seventh decade.
Magda Kapa writes:
This wonderful sky
How accurately it counts
Time, space, and borders.
Zero. None to see,
none to feel. Our mind is free
And flies where it needs
To be. Take that flight,
even with these borrowed wings,
to close your eyes would
be unforgiven.
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