A Million Stars

Photo credit: The Night Sky Observer

The Sagittarius teapot was bright in the sky.  A few more degrees to the right and it would appear to tip enough to shower the earth below.  The Milky Way, its steam, rising as it pours.

Despite the summer sky, Maine was cold earlier that week.  We needed a fire in the woodstove to warm up the house. I didn't know it at the time but not too far away a friend and his family were also in Maine.

Hikers from all over come to Baxter State Park, home to Mount Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine.  The land was a gift from a suspicious former governor unsure who he could trust to preserve the land.  Not even the federal government has a say in what goes on there. Three people control what happens in that park; the Attorney General, the Commissioner of Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and the Director of the Maine State Forest Service.  It belongs to the people of the State of Maine (as much as a mountain can belong to anyone).

It was a good night to huddle around a camp fire and then hunker down in a well-used sleeping bag. A good night to be with your two grown sons.  A good night to be alive.  

If anything can make you feel a pile of paperwork, a load of laundry or that the worries of today can wait until tomorrow, it's tramping through the woods. The Japanese call it "shinrin yoku" or forest bathing.  The ultimate stress reliever. If anyone could appreciate a moment in the woods, it was him.

He had already summited. His last, though he didn't know it and he was on his way down.  He died on the trail, doing what he loved in a place as close to heaven as he could get. I hope he didn't suffer. I'd like to think that in his final moments, he closed his eyes and saw the sky from the night before, imagined the constellations, the teapot, and the Milky Way, and he used them like explorers of old, letting the light from a million stars show him the way.  

A friend called the next day. As is the way of the Universe, a baby is coming and she's on her way to her first delivery as a doula. The baby, a girl, won't be born under the exact same sky.  This night sky will be hers and the light of a million and one stars will surely show her the way.