7 – Do you gaze at the sky and stars by night?

When else?

But yes! Yes, I do. Only, there's no sky at night. It's just a direction: up, outwards, away, towards everything that isn't the earth. What we see during the day is an illusion - light blue light scattered again and again till it falls into the eye.

Gazing out into the vast black emptiness of the universe, I find it hard to grasp the feeling. The familiar constellations are there zig-zagging hapazardly across the sky, accidents of perspective or hallucinations of mythologies long dead. By these the eye orients itself, finds it's dwelling a little too close to home. Like the camera that auto-focuses on the grimy bus window rather than the shimmering vista beyond it. Projecting the minds homely patterns onto chaos rather than allowing the raw stuff in, the surf on the breaking edge of the universe.

Refocus, unfocus, let eye and consciousness fade out to infinity, relax and take the long perspective.

Stars swim in and out of seeing as individual photons that have travelled unimaginably lonely distances collide with a scrap of retina the size of a postage stamp and there trigger the chemical cascades that turn the tiniest quanta of energy into the raw electric movements of thought.

Let them in, but let the mind touch gently on what we know. Not the myths and monsters, not the science fiction menageries and space opera fantasies, but what we know for sure when all the stories have been stripped away. All that we have learned just by looking outwards, by trusting to knowledge rather than surrendering to ignorance, by laying aside the stories that our grandparents told us, though we remember them fondly and taking up new stories that seem at first to have no place for us.

Every second, millions of invisible particles surge through your body, pass through the bulk of the earth, through molten core and crust as if it wasn't there. The pitch darkness is ateem, aswarm with fugitives from the solar furnaces, almost unconnected with the universe we see, but inseperable from it. Barely there by any measure, but real, present, ghostly.

Contemplate the awful distances between the stars, the almost emptiness that at the same time contains more than we can imagine. The giant stars far greater than our sun, that burn so much brighter and end their lives as supernovae. Bloated red giants, cool white dwarves. Stars that have consumed their nuclear fuels ages hence. Neutron stars that orbit one another at a hundred thousand miles an hour, so dense and spacetime-warping that a clock on the surface would run at half speed if it wouldn't be instantly crushed molecule-flat. Black holes so massive that they rip a hole in our understanding of the universe -  a million times the mass of our sun - so vast that you could cross their event horizon irrevocably without ever realising it. The titanic earth-boiling energies, the vasts of time that make pointed jokes of the cartoon abstraction of eternity, distances measured in billions of years, scales at which even the fabric of the universe is stretched from true.

I can get lost for hours gazing up and out, away, away.