“To be more childlike, you don’t have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe.”
~ Wayne Dyer
Casper’s lights shone and the sounds of hollering and cheers from 50,000 of the town’s residents plus tens of thousands visitors rose to join the whoops from those of us on that hill.
Glancing at the sun, with the moon as its black pupil and the corona its yellow iris, gave me vertigo. I sat on the ground feeling Mother Earth and her comforting gravity with my hands as the clockwork mathematics of orbital mechanics demonstrated its action along the plane of the solar system.
My heart raced. These celestial movements sparked the development of creativity and the evolution of intelligence and mastery as generations of humans observed, recorded, studied, attempted to explain, and ultimately devised mathematical language and symbols to break nature’s secret codes and predict, to the millisecond, the movements of our closest celestial neighbors. Our modern technological civilization owes its existence to human curiosity about the night sky.
And I was also present to Stonehenge and other monuments and cave art from my ancestors worldwide who celebrated and feared these movements. The movements of the cosmos are as embedded in human psyche as the atoms in our bodies, forged in stars that are our most intimate kin. As Carl Sagan said, we are quite literally the universe made manifest and trying to understand itself through a human neurology.
Then the moment passed. The light flicked on. We spotted a fox racing along the foot of the hill, fooled into coming out of his burrow and now freaking out with the sudden daylight, unable to process what had just happened.
I’m still filled with awe a day later.
