Hinc Itur ad Astra

–from here the way leads to the stars

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The sky is nothing and everything; all-encompassing and never-ending. It’s an eternal window into the cosmos and it’s a barrier between us, the fragile and miniscule inhabitants stuck to the parameters of this rock-and-water planet that’s hurtling around an exploding sun at 67,000 miles per hour.

No matter what, though, there is someone in Chico looking at the sky; someone in Paris looking at the sky; someone in Korea looking at the sky and it’s not the same in essence, but if I were a philosophy major or in a metaphysical theory class or a poet I’d posture that it’s not the same logically but it’s the same in spirit and that’s what matters.

I’ve had the glorious burden of long assignments and not enough hours in the day to complete them within healthy hours leading to the pleasure of “all-nighters” and more coffee than blood coursing through my veins. But that moment in the ungodly hour between far too early and far too late, when sleep is gnawing at my consciousness like a docile, rabid pet trying to get attention, when the world around me is holding its breath and ready to sigh; this moment is when the daylight breaks through the crisp indigoes of the night and begins to bleed through the darkness to bring something akin to bloody, rosy, hallowed light to the trees, the sidewalk,  the very breath puffing from weary lips and exploding into the warming air like my soul is trying to catch a glimpse of such a stunning wonderful natural amazing mundane everyday extraordinary ordinary sight.

In Babylonian mythology, it was the death of the sea and the moon that created the heavens. The Babylonian legend of creation found on the Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh claims the natural world was formed from Thalassa, the sea goddess and equally interchangeable Moon goddess as “Belus [the God of War and creator of Babylon] came, and cut the woman asunder: and one of half of her he formed the earth, and of the other half the heavens”. After which Belus “divided the darkness and separated the Heavens from the Earth, and reduced the universe to order.”

In Roman mythology, Jupiter was the God of the Sky and the Earth and the Gods themselves; he survived filicide by the sheer love and fear and disgust of The Mother of Gods. He took control of the skies after the defeat of his father and the liberation of his siblings.

1, 467 miles away, and almost 2, 247 years earlier, the god Ra is swallowed by Nut, the sky, and the heavens, and every night he would travel through the underworld to return in the morning.

The Olden Nordic god of the sky Tyr was overtaken of his post by Odin, who hung on Yggdrasil, the tree of life, for nine days, bleeding with his innards pouring from his stomach as he passed day and night on the world tree.

When the dawn breaks and the sky begins to bleed rich and rosy and bloody-red and the dew glistens with the amber of the rising sun, I think of the sacrifices from these ancient pantheons and the lives that lived off these myths. They may be myths now but they were religion, truth then.

The dawn is a thing of miracles and myths; when the sun is aloft on its throne in the sky and steadily rising like a majestic figure to light our way, the sky changes into a hundred thousand shades of blue and sapphire and azure and other priceless hues. I’ve always had a curiosity for how people paint the sky when it’s so early in the morning; how does one capture the right tint, the perfect shade, the correct tone? The computer can generate the #58D3F7 blue or a gorgeous #00BFFF but it is not the dynamic depth of color in 78% Nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% Argon and minuscule other gas particles.

And on cloudy days, on days where layers of translucent sheets of water would gather atop a single point like a heat barrier that would limit its growth, those days the sky would be a darker cobalt with a sheen of gray tint. These natural plumes would grow wispy and weak and frail until they returned from the air whence they came. Or on others, the waves of dense parcels would growl under its breath, darken into hundreds of shades until it wept, lamenting the sunlight behind its droplets.

The sky is beautiful when out of control. A cyclone brings beauty down from the heavens, grinding with the force of Coriolis until the sky and the Earth are united in awful artful destruction. And after—once the fear and the winds and the water and the awful have all subsided, the sky is an innocent, forgiven blue cobalt indigo azure cerulean of hope. It’s strange, how dependent the earth is on latitude and longitude, the angle each person is from92,960,000 miles from the sun, the position of the axial tilt in regards to how much insolation we are targeted at that determines how hot our days become, how long our storms rage, how cold and desolate our winters become.

Rain falls at about 22 miles per hour. These droplets start as microscopic water particles that join with cloud condensation nuclei; then there are over a million connections to form a single raindrop. Snow forms similarly, only the drop is frozen into an ice crystal that collects and grows until it is deposited into the air like a parting gift from the sky itself.

Humans are 70% water. Each second, 16 million tons of water are evaporated from the earth and each second 16 million tons of water are put back into the earth. Clouds are caused by air parcels rising as they cool, then condensing once they reach their dew points. Thunderstorms are caused by fast-rising, unstable air that develops rain too fast and loses itself quickly as they pour themselves out into the earth once more.

Lightning moves at one mile in five seconds, heating the air around it to 30, 000 °C. I used to think that lightning struck the earth like a quick flash of righteous fury. Instead, a negative charge falls from the heavens as positive electricity rises from the ground and together they fall. Opposites attract, and together they strike like quick bursts of romance, there and gone again.

After the rain, there is always something left lingering in the air, like the petulant storm’s residual presence lingering in the damp sidewalks, the dripping trees, the tiny lakes of puddles splashed throughout the land. It smells like nature, like dirt and ozone, like earth and sky. However, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote:

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”

The smell of the rain is not from the rain itself, actually. The smell comes from the chemical breakdown of the soil on behalf of the acidity of the atmosphere captured in the drops and given to the soil; the smell comes from Actinomycetes spores that are lifted from the ground by the onslaught of precipitation; the smell comes from oils that plants and trees release that meet with the showers.

Still, Vonnegut also said to “live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy”. So it rains, and we waft through the lingering perfume of ozone and zephyr and Earth and Sky and everything we are told as children.

Around noon, the sun is at its pinnacle, depending on where one resides, of course. The sun is a hazy, white ball of fiery heat, blazing haughtily from its perch. Its heat radiates through the sky, the air, the ground; off in the distance the heat rolls in waves; the heat laps at your skin, leaving the body with sweat, taking the very droplets from the flesh in sticky, sweltering degrees.

Any clouds are a godsend; their slow float is highlighted by a pure halo of light granting them magnificence.  The seemingly bright white light from the sun is absorbed greedily or sedately by the sand, the concrete, the monstrous, mirrored sentinels of the city, by the slow rustling of the trees; each gains heat through their composition, their color, the makeup of how we have found them or how we have built them.

But the sky is clear, or it is cloudy, or it is windy; behind the storms, the clouds, behind the layers of particles and debris, the sun is combusting infinitely, as it has for millions of years and will burn on for thousands more. I can walk onto a beach and see the horizon bright into the distance, a stark line of bright whiteness separating the darker ocean from the bright, baby-blues of the sky, stretching further than my straining sight.

It’s generally believed by young ones and adults that don’t know any better that the sky is blue due to its reflectiveness of the world’s vast oceans. To this I have only two things to say, first of which is a very drawn out drawl of “h o w” and secondly, “no”.

Sunlight may seem white, but it’s actually a collection of light energies. To unite the earth and skies once more, light travels just as the water along the beach shore: in waves. Each color is at a different wave rate. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet compose this spectrum; picture Pink Floyd’s iconic image of a white light hitting the prism, and the light bending at the other end into the spectrum.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a very detailed children’s guide to why the sky is blue; in short terms, “sunlight reaches Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny molecules of air in Earth’s atmosphere”. Because blue is scattered the most, we see a blue sky.

Red sunsets occur when the sun’s light hits the atmosphere at such an angle where the red, orange and yellow light energies are the least scattered. With more blue being scattered, there is less of it to see.

Rainbows are full circles that we see only partially from our position on the ground. Unlike snowflakes, which have been proven to not be as unique as we have told ourselves to be (“harmless untruths,” Vonnegut whispers from the grave), rainbows are not seen the same by everyone. They occur when the atmosphere both reflects and refracts the light from the sun, splitting the white light into the spectrum. This intangible beauty is composed of colors we know and colors we can’t see with the limited rods and cones in our eyes. No matter how close we get to these chromo-aerial majesties, they move away at the same rate.

This isn’t an elaborate metaphor, but it’d be poor of us, I as the writer and you as a reader, to not see a sort of metaphysical symbolism in that.

Afternoons are lazy, all warm hues like a comfortable fire to marvel at from our perches. The gorgeous blue mingles with a soft orange as the sun falls to a cradle just above the horizon; the clouds reject their white halos for burning peach hues.

In the cityscape, pollution sets the sky ablaze in rosy tints and an indignant red-orange blush. The smog and particles of deadly toxins are disgusting, yet in the aging light of the dying day they are simply filaments of this painting. I’m no artist, by far no painter, and yet each passing day the sky seems like another freshly crafted canvas.  I wish my hands could hold these colors, this beauty, translate the scattering down into the brush and capture these moments in everlasting, ethereal technicolor.

Here in the midst of nature, where the mortal created plumes of toxicity don’t hover like gloomy clouds of poison, the sky burns almost white in the distance. Heat is a distancing memory with the setting sun. The wind caresses the trees, tickles their branches so the leaves rustle and titter aloud; the sky is releasing a deep breath, done for the day.

Our sun, the Sun, is actually a small exploding pocket of gasses that constitutes a green star. Every star we see in the distance, seemingly just beyond our grasp, is brighter than our sun. Our green-star-sun emits a wavelength that falls between green and blue.

It is important to remember that there is always light in the darkness of night; beyond the borrowed light of the moon, there is a celestial light that allows us to see the darkened silhouette of an object against the astronomical backdrop.

In 1969 the first man stepped on the moon. Though Yuri Gagarin won the first leg of the 60’s space race for Russia, it was Neil Alden Armstrong that took the first step on the chalky lunar surface. At 225, 745 miles away, the moon is the greatest source of light in the night sky, reflecting light from the sun differently in each step of it’s cycle.

The Aztec myth of the creation of the moon goes simply and violently like this: the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui was embarrassed and angry with her mother, Coatlicue, the Earth, for she was pregnant. With the Centzon Huitznahua, the Gods of the Southern Stars, Coyolxauhqui concocted a plan to kill the unborn child, who she believed would be the sun and outshine her in the sky. As the attack started, hummingbird feathers fell on the swollen belly of the Earth Goddess, and Huitzilopochtli sprang from the uterus in full war regalia; the newly born God of War murdered the traitors, ripped Coyolxauhqui apart limb from limb, and threw her severed head along with the Centzon Huitznahua into the sky, so Coatlicue could still see the remnants of her daughter, the Moon, every night.

Our modernized theories of the moon do not bode well in anything except, perhaps, the lack of bloodshed that the Aztecs believed. For centuries it was believed that the moon could cause insanity. As the oxford dictionary defines a lunatic:

“Middle English: from Old French lunatique, from late Latin lunaticus, from Latin luna ‘moon’ (from the belief that changes of the moon caused intermittent insanity)”

As Pink Floyd would put it, “see you on the dark side of the moon”.

The night is generally cooler than the day on the basis of no sun, less heat. So the nights are darker, and colder, but full of so much cool grace it is hard to not enjoy them all the same. Gone are the shades of crystalline blue of the sky, replaced, instead, by amethyst and indigoes and navy and a hint of amaranthine. The moon shuffles along in gawky finesse through its rotation; each waxing crescent to gibbous to half gives way to the swell of the full moon until, diminished at last, the nocturnal lantern begins to wane into rebirth.

“You cannot look up at the night sky on the Planet Earth and not wonder,” Tom Hanks muses, “what it’s like to be up there amongst the stars. And I always look up to the moon and see it as the most romantic place within the cosmos.” And as our eyes follow the moon across the night sky, we silently trace the curve of its visible craters aided by the mellow light it emits.

We name the moons by its size, by its color or by the month. We hail the Full Cold Moon during December where the nights are longer and bitter, and the days feel like missed memories of sunlight; the winter nights are harsh and brisk but so honest in their arctic hazards; there is no false cheer in the snow, in the flurries and storms.

So the night is dark, and though most find it bleak it is the most hopeful of times; no matter how dark things seem, there is no such thing as darkness. The light of the sun reflects off the moon into our eyes; the light of stars, dead and dying and burning and collapsing and sowondrous, are reaching us here, now, in the cold, brisk night.

If dead things can still reach out to us and give us light, help us travel, then why despair?

“We are a Way to the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of starstuff,” Carl Sagan said in the 1980’s PBS 13-part television series titled Cosmos.

There are as many neurons in our body as stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Comparing a brain cell to the universe; the same dendrite-like branches, the same cell body and a similar web-like configuration connects and paradoxically juxtaposes the two natural phenomena.

We are a carbon-based life form. The Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Theory claims that various compositions of helium and  hydrogen were forged from the original impact; the heavier atomic elements were created in the interior of stars. Stars are composed mainly of Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Silicon, Magnesium, Neon, Iron and Sulfur. These elements are considered heavy elements only formed in stars.

People contain Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium and Phosphorus, and traces of Potassium, Sulfur, Sodium, Chlorine, and Magnesium.

All of the elements in our bodies above Helium originated from the interior of stars.

“With chemical elements forged over 14 billion years in the fires of high-mass stars that exploded into space, and with these elements enriching subsequent generations of stars with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other basic ingredients of life itself, we are not just figuratively but literally made of stardust,” Neil deGrasse Tyson says.

This is science and poetry in one ancient breath stretching from the start of the universe to this very moment.

I would always sit and marvel at the stars growing up. The fiery conniption of these relics of thousands and millions of years ago live within me, in the very cells that compose my body. From my position on the earth, rotating at 1000 miles per hour, the amount of stars I can’t see and the handful that I can make me feel, not insignificant, but large.

We are one in billions on a watery rock orbiting a ball of combusting gases in a solar system surrounded by billions more on the edge of an ever-expanding galaxy in a terribly giant universe. I look up into infinity, and feel giant.

I can’t name the constellations, but I can always appreciate the stars. When the sky is clear and even pollution can’t stop those dimmed lights from shining through, it’s important to remember that someone centuries ago may have stopped and wished on that very star, or worshipped that celestial being, and now we’re seeing the remnants of those wishes, of those people.

But I am not a scientist. I am not a poet.

So these stars are thousands of years away and the further we see the further into the past we are looking and it’s wondrous and mind-boggling and things of science fiction. H.G Wells would weep; Ray Bradbury would write sonnets over these burnt out children of the One Grand Explosion, the creators of the elements that compose us.

Van Gogh painted Starry Night; scientists have painted a surreal picture of the stars, as well. Oh starry, starry night, indeed! Because beyond those we see there are millions more, and nebulae, galaxies, dark matter that composes most of what we see yet cannot touch.

Yet we feign to follow the line of a constellation, the curve of the Big Dipper, Lepus the Hare, the bulking form of Orion the Hunter. As it is, of course, and always shall be, we create figures and stories to understand what we cannot. So the stars form figures, and the figures tell a story that the ancients heard and that we still tell.

Somewhere, a child wishes on the bend of Cassiopeia.

Over 2, 000 years ago, Cassiopeia is a vain and selfish Queen of Ethiopia according to the Greeks and their mythos.

“There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe,” Neil deGrasse Tyson says in the 2014 remake of Cosmos.