The Perfect Summer Night

We live finite lives. There are limits to everything. There will only ever be but a few nights in any given lifetime when the summer weather is perfect to view the sky from a high point on a moonless night. The absolute silent arc of the Milky Way is more beautiful than anything you can imagine. The prairie offers silence - not often, especially in the summer - but tonight is one of those times. The only sound is the quiet stirring of the grass in the gentle wind.

I sat in the car, no longer nimble enough to crawl onto the roof to lay down for an unimpeded view of the stars. The light pollution from Topeka increases every year as the entire city expands west. Mercury lights now scar the horizon, marking new homes in the neighborhood. My aging eyes can no longer see the night sky in sharp detail but I remember what it looks like through young eyes.

From long habit, I imagined the view, the very spot, as it would have looked when the Kansa were the only people here. No one now can imagine how bright the stars would have appeared. If a Kansa woman had ventured away from camp to ponder the magnificent array of stars in solitude she surely would have felt the same wonder.

The First People understood the stars, perhaps not an understanding that would translate into our current science but they would have known the fundamental truth of stars. There was no Church, no Dark Ages for the First People. They were free human beings, living wholly within the grace of nature. And just as the universe draws near to me in the silence, it would have drawn near to the prairie woman of long ago.

From the web site: Astronomy Picture of the Day