“Come along my little love, time for a pee,” I say as I stand outside in the cold, crisp, night air.
The bedside clock glared 4.30am at me as I stumbled across the bedroom with my elderly dog Ella Bella needing a night time pee. Who can blame her. At 15yrs old, or something well over 100yrs in human terms, a night time pee is understandable.
And so, here I stand waiting for Ella and staring into the beauty of the night sky. It’s so wondrous that I think a return to bed would be a mistake. I am missing so much when I close my eyes and fall asleep. When I lie snug as a bug in a rug, with the covers pulled up tight under my chin I am missing out on this explosion of activity revealed before me - an ancient world illuminating the sky.
Whoosh a shooting star, totally unexpected, flashes through the darkness revealing its path before vanishing over the horizon. I catch my breath but the inky blackness and the stars winking and blinking in it appear unmoved, they remain exactly as they were before.
As I stoop to sit on the cold tiles at the edge of the veranda, I marvel at the distance from which these twinkling dots are emanating their light. How many light years has it taken for this brilliance to reach the retina at the back of my eyeball? Hundreds or maybe thousands, millions even? I can’t remember but it’s a lot, that I know.
And I can’t quite fathom it. Can’t quite understand the trajectory of light leaving the star and taking eons to arrive here on Earth. Am I looking into the past as I gaze at the stars? Perhaps?
In the meantime, I shall sit here and scrutinise these balls of light energy and wonder at the different constellations and try to name each twinkling star as I watch their magical patterns.
Sitting in contemplation it dawns on me that some must be satellites as they seem to flash white, then blue, or was it red or perhaps both. Such a distant flash of colour. The light changes so fast and I am uncertain whether that is a true star or one of Elon Musk’s collection of satellites connecting people across the planet via Starlink. Which am I looking at: star or satellite?
Ella, now sitting beside me shakes and I realise she at least wants the softness of her bed to soothe and protect her aching bones. So, despite my better judgment, I give the stars one last glance, get up and take her back inside. Back to the warmth and comfort of our beds, back to the oblivion of sleep. Back to dreaming of stars and all the planets teaming with energy and life of which we have no knowledge.
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