“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Somewhere, just somewhere, between our
atmosphere and infinity, there are stars, seven thousand of them to see with
the naked eye. But they can only be seen from the right place. I was brought up
amidst the dark Glasgow Clydeside tenements where life had a sepia-tone
dullness like that of a Victorian photo and stars were what I read about in
children’s books.
It was when I travelled to the Scottish islands in
summer that I realised there lay a starlit sky full of wonder away from the
light polluted city.
Last winter on a crisp, icy Saturday evening, we booked into a hotel in
Newton Stewart and after our chicken bhuna and peshawari naan, we set off to
visit the Dark Sky Forest at Kirroughtree Visitors Centre in Dumfries and
Galloway. The place was as dark as…you know what I mean. Apart from a few
stargazers with campervans and a Chinese astronomer, we were the only ones
there. We took a walk to a quiet place and there we found ourselves alone with
seven thousand stars, every one of them.
So many emotions filled my soul: loneliness,
awesomeness, wonder, and the knowledge I was staring into a distant past that
no longer existed in the form I was observing. I knew I was not alone; sometime
in 1000 BC, give or take a century, a shepherd boy sat on a hill at a time when
the whole earth was a dark sky location and he asked the creator of all these
stars a question, poetically,
When I consider your heavens,
The work of your finger,
The moon and the stars,
Which you have set in place,
What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
Human beings that you care for them?
Psalm 8:3-6 NIV
In the hustle and bustle of life, take time to stop
stroking your mobiles and walk with the stars; you are sharing history with
others.
Kirroughtree Visitor Centre -
Forestry and Land Scotland
Image by https://unsplash.com/@mwrona
