It's funny how you look at stars and can be transported to a time and place in your past when you were looking up and pondering over life. Long ago, someone showed the Orion to me and every time I look up at a starry sky and can spot my constellations I single out the Orion and instantly think of him. But this post is neither about him nor about the Orion. It's about places where you can look up and still see a starry sky and contemplate life and all that lies beyond all that we know and all that we are. There is something about the vastness of the night sky that puts you in your place as an insignificant part of that exists in this cosmos. It often also leads to major decisions, solutions or letting go of stuff, because when you realise how small you are in comparison to all that exists, you can not but take a step back and re-evaluate your thoughts, until it dawns on you that that worries and stresses of your life are actually not that intense as you believe them to be, or if they are, they can for a moment in time be put away or aside as you stare up at the sky and just gaze at the stars.
There's few things I would do for long periods of time without feeling like I need to move or be useful, watching the clouds move across a day sky, and watching the stars twinkle at night are some of them. One strain of thought would lead to another and i would be thinking of all aspects of my life - good, bad, ugly, past, future, dreams, hopes, love, hate, loves lost, loves gained, hatred / disappointment I have let go of and hatred /disappointment that still rests in me, my motivations, my ambitions or lack thereof, the people i love and the people who love me - and many more such things. All of these flash past my eyes as i sit and stare.
I'll end this quite random post at 12:00 am in the night blabbering away about stars, with a poem about standing and staring. Written by WH Davies, it's called Leisure:
What is this life, if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows
No time to see, when woods we pass
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass
No time to see in broad daylight
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can,
Enrich the smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
I lead a yoga class once with "stand and stare" being the theme, encouraging people to just be in the moment and appreciate the beauty that surrounds them without feeling the compulsion of having to rush and to achieve in every single moment of their lives.
I can still close my eyes and feel my students in Shavasana, as I narrated this poem out loud in the darkness of the yoga room during an evening class, hoping that they would connect to these words as I did.
It's still one of the poems I come back to when things get too busy in life and I feel the need to do nothing - and when I do get the rare time to do that, I get myself to simply stand and stare.
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