Like this:

It’s almost a full moon tonight and I can see the stars peeking out from behind huge puffy clouds gently floating in the night sky.   A bright silver ball nestled within a denim sky filled with cotton candy clouds, a poetic spectacle parading before me as I take my walk.  Content with the beauty and grandeur of the scene, I begin to walk back  home satisfied and full.

I’ve done this a thousand times before, taking walks in the night, when everyone else is snuggled within their homes watching t.v or  preparing for sleep.  My day seems to start with dusk, when the sky turns a velvety indigo and the stars begin to appear. With the night sky surrounding me, I often feel so free!  Oh, the mystery, oh the solitude.  The wind from outside beckons me, follow me  here, follow me there.  Like a sleepwalker, I stumble outdoors and breathe in the evening, the quiet and the shadows.  It is time to follow my thoughts, the wind, the stars, to feel the infinitude of the sky and the mystery of the universe!  How quaint and small the homes look in comparison.  How petty and trite our daytime cares and concerns seem in relation to the cosmos revealed!  I attune myself to the bigger picture, the grander scheme, the greater reality when I take my walks.  I seem to journey through space and time as I think to myself only those thoughts that get tucked away during my daytime travails. “Why are we here?”  “Who are we and where did we come from?” “Did we come from other places and times, other planets and solar systems?”   “Is there life out there in that big universe?

“Beam me up Scotty”, Captain Kirk used to say on the t.v. show StarTrek.  I would often feel it possible on my nightly walks to be suddenly carried away in to the sky.  Why not?  My thoughts would carry me away, posing question after question, why wouldn’t a  a UFO sense my needs and suddenly whisk me away?

To be honest, I have had dreams where I am inside a space ship with human looking aliens in (alas) jumpsuits who are talking to me about the problems of Earth.  In one particular dream, we are looking out a huge window onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike and looking at all the traffic congestion and tsk, tsking to ourselves about the plight of the human highway system.   “So inefficient!”, my alien friends would sigh.  “So polluting  and noisy”, I would chime back.  They seem to be on some kind of observation mission and will report back to their superiors their findings about this planet.

“Earth has been trampled upon, almost ruined by the technologies and technocracies of the modern day, post industrialized culture of Western Europe and  North America”, I would imagine they would say. ….

Cut up into infinite mosaics of squares, rhombuses, lines and circles, our natural world looks more like a circuit board or a computer chip.  It’s hard to imagine the world without highways,  streets, roads, driveways, developments, strip malls, industrial parks, smoke stacks, gas lines, electrical lines, landing strips, water towers, nuclear towers, twin towers, well, the list is endless.  The plethora of structures, connections, buildings bespeaks of our apparent need to create but also our apparent need to dominate…. the land, the sky, the water oh my!!  Where is nature hiding out in all of this stuff?  Where did Mother Nature go?

That’s one question I always ask myself at night, when I ask so many other questions, as well.  But then, I just have to look around, and smell the sweet fragrance of the bee balm or the honey suckle, and step on the wet grass and tickle each blade with my toes to know that Mother Nature is not lost or forgotten.  She is, in fact,  the night sky; she is, in fact, the stars; she is, in fact, the velvety backdrop of my nightly rambles.  She is everywhere and no where.  She is everything and no-thing.  She is the yin and the yang.  She is  the Mighty Mother/Father, the source of life itself, the sweet succulent honey of existence that pours itself into every moment.  She is truly the source of all nourishment.  With this thought, I feel caressed and surrounded by her velvet touch and I feel safe again, not so scared by the “what ifs” and the “why nots” and the “look how awful the world is”.  Oh, my sweet Mother Earth, you have reassured me that All is Well, for now and that I have made yet another safe landing.

I walk home and open the door to enter my apartment but stop before going in  to feel the ground beneath me and to breathe  the fresh air once more and to smile once again at the quiet but ever steady revelations of my nightly moonlit walks.

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