Two hours drive from the city, up the forested roads of Mt. Rainier, comes a parking lot below a clearing. On the eve of a new moon, on a warm summer night, we hiked up and settled down, turned off our headlamps and looked up, dilated our pupils and gasped.
There was not an inch of the sky except that it had multiple specs of light, all twinkling and shining. If you looked long enough you’d see a streak in the sky, a star shooting after some invisible prey, a flash then fading behind a black curtain as quickly as it emerged. A cacophony of light, photons hitting our eyeballs hours, months, centuries after they were first emitted, resting finally once behind the lens of our eyes. A veritable miracle, a breathtaking show, not just for the sheer grandeur and the untouchable beauty, but for the elegant physics that make it all possible. The right mix of gasses and temperatures, friction and fission, mass and velocity, combustion and gravity, the expanses of space, the linearity of time, all dancing together in this dazzling show above.
For us it was a remarkable evening, one night out of perhaps a few dozen in the thousands in our lives where we take note of what is happening above. But these stars come out every night, as they have billions of nights before, as they will for countless nights to come, signs to those who are looking for direction.
It is us who don’t see them anymore, because we simply don’t look up enough.
Indeed, it is not the eyes that are blind, but it is the hearts in the chests that grow blind. [22:46]
Obaid Farooqui 