zimatravels

It had become a birthday tradition — lying on our backs looking up at the night sky in the mountains and trying to catch the shooting stars of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

The night was right.  The sky was dark.  The stars twinkled above, little more than pinpricks of light reaching to infinity.

In the stillness and the waiting, imagination and animation — the dot whizzing by was a satellite, the blinking lights were planes, the particularly bright  and stationary light was certainly a space station.

In time, the wonder of the immensity of what the sky held took over.  How many light years was I looking at?  Would any of the shooting stars land as meteorites?

And then, I saw it.  I had been looking at it for a long time, but finally realized that the Milky Way was spread out and visible above me.  Such vastness and yet such intimacy!

The next shooting star reminded me that I was actually watching death.  I thought how wonderful to go out spectacularly in a blaze of light.