The stars soften this world. Seeing them illuminates the darker parts of my life that feel so hard, so permanent. It loosens the tightness in my chest and allows me to inhale with conscious awareness. I see from a further perspective just how essential breath is, how pure it is, and how nothing else is always with me.
Space gives me perspective. It helps me to realize that I am infinite, that anything is possible. Everything that I know has taken place on this pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan puts it, in the vastness of space.
Everything exists in this space. The trees, the flowers, the people, the animals. We need it to function. We need space to live fully as ourselves. And what are we? We’re beings on the surface of a rotating ball in quite possible infinity. We’re carbon based life forms, the same as the stars are made of. The matter of the world is outside and within us. Do we feel what that means?
In this great vastness, I need space to exist. I need to make space for space, taking the necessary steps to be completely involved with it. I sit to feel what it’s like to be here on this great ecosystem. Looking up at the stars at night makes me think that in my life, what is most important is to see what this is all about. Not just to think about it, but to be as sensitive as I can, to feel it deeply, at the root. If I were to meet an alien, what would I tell them about my Earth? This spaceship that I live on with so many others.
I take space out of my day to do my best to feel what it means to be in space. It’s so easy to get caught up in what I’m saying. To use the words as the lines of longitude and latitude on the surface and miss what the real thing is. This is an ecosystem, always breaking down and building up. I don’t want to miss that. I want to see it, breathe it, because it is me that is this breath. To die and live with that. The same molecules that are inside me are inside those stars, exploding all the time. I sit so I can live something completely new and create the universe all over again, every moment, in this eternal universe, on this pale blue dot.
