What do you see?

When you look up into the night sky?

Inky darkness?

Blinking trails and lights – most likely planes or passing satellites?

Yet among these creations other things reside.

Special things.

Beautiful things.

Old things.

Things that have been up in the sky and will continue to be there for much, much longer than anything mankind could ever construct with his temporary hands.
These things flicker and they dance and they talk, whispering among each other, passing messages flung across unfathomable oceans of vacuum and light upon wisps and sails of solar wind and radiance that carry them through the vast unknown, through totally foreign spaces, and to the unimaginably infinite corners of the universe – only for these messages to reach the end their journey upon our rough diamond of a home after a thousand millennia of traveling, trekking, journeying, and spearing through the cosmos, shooting at speeds that almost breach reality itself – and somehow a few of these messages, mere particles that are just tiny, tiny, pinpricks of fractions of the absolute pure luminance of the source, enter our very own pupils, causing them to flex and to bend and to focus and our irises to contract and surge as our brains fire and crackle with life and electricity as they sort and process antique lumens from a source that could have burned out a million years ago, who’s ghost lives on to continue to carry that message, by hand, across the great dessert of the interstellar.

These things call like beacons, they draw us out like tides.

Can you feel it?

The push?

The pull?

The urge to let it take you somewhere you’ve never been?

Somewhere new?

This is the riptide of the heavens, the undertow of the celestial, the current of the transcendental drifting you, carrying you, sweeping you, ripping you, blasting you away from familiar shores to new seas of possibility and sands of infinite time and finite existence.

It’s dark out here.

In this ocean of black whirlpools and ancient storms of swirling cosmic dust and crystals.

But it’s okay.

There’s light up ahead in the distance.

All you have to do is paddle.

The unimaginable, the imcomprehencingly beautiful, is what awaits you over this next endless horizon. The possibility of what is out there is boundless and the probability that you will find something that will foster insurrection of your perception is higher than you think.

This is not the last great frontier – frontiers can be conquered and tamed.

This is not a bold new voyage – voyages have destinations and schedules.

This is not a long, arduous journey – journeys exist only in stories of the past in faraway lands with people we’ll never know.

This is here.

This is now.

This is us.

This is progress

This is a step.

Now, it’s an admittedly shaky one, like an unsure footfall of an infant realizing there is a world outside of the cradle – but it is unapologetic, it is justified, and it is the first of many more to come. Soon there will be more like it, but they will be stronger, filled with more confidence, and they will be pointed firmly forward.

Not long after that, we won’t be just taking steps anymore.
We will be running, dashing, bolting, and pounding our feet and stretching our muscles – and there may be a few sprains or even broken bones, but they will heal with time.

All scares do.

Even the ones on us right here and right now, the ones holding us back from taking the plunge, from diving head first into the gravitational waves and holding our breath as long as we can below the shifting dark matter and among the roaring, pulsing, screaming, pushing, pulling existence that it means to be in this universe.

Now, as you look into the night sky, what do you see?

There’s only a few tiny pinpricks of light, only small clusters of blinking beacons hopelessly shining in the distance.

You’re confused.

Where is the vast ocean? The endless expanse of possibility? The unfathomably beautiful things?

It’s dark out here too, even at home.

But it is us who shine the light. 

It is our minds, our imaginations, our souls, our spirits, our humanity, our destinies, our meanings, and our drive – our burning need – to transcend, that lights our path, that blazes our trail, that keeps the flame kindled and reaching skyward.

It is up to you as to what you see when you look up.

You can see nothing – just a scattering of diamonds across a midnight canvas that’s to be painted with smog and brushes of earthbound industry.

Or you can see everything – what lies beyond the atmosphere, what will be there much longer than you ever will be.

Yet, we are not insignificant.

The light we receive like gifts from those wise, ancient ones isn’t the only source of warmth and life in this universe. In fact, we happen to be in possession of something just as powerful and just as radiant.

What is it?

It is us.

Our bond as a collective race.

Our given love.

Our shared pain.

Our second-hand smiles.

Our optimistic transmissions.

Our ability to overcome, our instinct to adapt, our willingness to be taken with the tide.

It washes over things just as warmly with the coming mornings and it burns just as furiously on the horizon against the dying light.

Know that you are as a flaring sun, as a bursting supernova, as a twisting nebula, as a spiraling galaxy.

Know that you are beaming just as brightly as the Stars themselves.

Now, turn your gaze heavenward one last time.

This sky is your home after all.

Under it is where you were born.

Where you were raised and shaped and molded and grown.

Where you’ve loved and where you’ve learned and where you’ve lived.

But it doesn’t have to be where you will die.

What do you see?