Sneaking up on the stars
To live is to meet the universe as an equal.
But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that’s all.
--Fleur Adcock, “Weathering”
I used to sneak up on the stars. Oh, I don’t mean George Clooney or Julia Roberts. I mean the ones up in the sky. I was living in a friend’s mother-in-law apartment about 15 years ago (except she had had it built for her mother), in a suburb west of Boston, and it was far enough from the city lights that you could see the stars at night.
There was a problem, though. My friend’s house had a motion sensor over the garage, so when I came home after dark and walked up the driveway, the sensor light would come on, blinding my vision, and I couldn’t see the stars. So I learned to park well away from the garage and tiptoe across the front lawn, dodging the sensor so it wouldn’t trip. I called my little routine “sneaking up on the stars.”
I felt then, and still do, that such a maneuver was very magician-like. When you spend your life claiming to be able to do the impossible, you do feel that once in a while you should pull off something that really sounds impossible—in this instance, catching all the stars in the sky by surprise.
I’m thinking back to that time because this past July, my wife and I moved to a tiny town in Southern Vermont, where we bought a house in a secluded location surrounded by mountains partly so we could see starry night skies all the time. No more sneaking around.
It was an expensive and, given the multiphase process of packing, storing, staging and selling one home and buying another, a labor-intensive workaround to the motion-sensor problem. But once again, I thought I was being clever: Rather than try to sneak up on the universe, now we had purchased a front row seat and could drop in and see the show anytime we liked.
So far, though, the universe has outfoxed me. Before we fenced in our acre-plus property to keep our dogs from seeing more of Vermont than we would like, I was reluctant to go out at night and look up, because our backyard is basically the state forest, thick with trees and the unknown beyond, and rather than me sneak up on the stars, I was concerned that something might sneak up on me, like the bear that wandered into our yard on several occasions to eat the apples that had fallen from our tree. Or the fisher cat we were sure had been lurking along the trail right behind our house.
Then, after we fenced in the yard, winter came with its clear night skies and stillness, ideal conditions to stargaze. But most nights the snow was too deep to wander too far from the porch or it was below zero and my eyes were bleary from writing.
In other words, so far, although I have seen a few spectacular night skies, most of my stargazing has come courtesy of streaming movies on Hulu, including, yes, George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
What has caught me by surprise, however—and for a magician, surprise of any sort is a rare and welcome occurrence—are the mornings.
In just this past week, we have seen a cardinal cavorting in the tangles of a viny bush outside our kitchen window, an eagle soaring overhead on our morning foray into the forest with the dogs, and, outside my office window while I was on a Zoom call, an owl with a massive wingspan swooping over our backyard, lighting on our sugar maple tree and holding there long enough for us to admire.
When it snows in the morning, as it did today, it looks as if we live inside a snow globe. Our backyard looks like a photographer has applied special effects.
And the forest presents vistas that make me think of Ansel Adams.
Ah, me. Here I had thought I had put one over on the universe by moving to a place where creation would reveal its splendor to me each and every night. The universe said, hey, Magic Boy, check out my morning.
It also said: Why do you forget that we stars are still here during the day while your planet faces the sun and you can’t see us because, well, frankly, the motion sensor is tripping like crazy? Daytime’s when you’re moving; try holding still. We bursts of light are hidden by the light, and maybe that is something you should think about.
But then it also said this: Good for you for checking us out. We were made for you and everyone you know and for everyone in the world. There is no source for this, no puppet master pulling strings. We are all just here. We should keep in touch.
As every new day dawns, the stars are still there, and the life that surrounds me here, from the turkeys who wander our roads and yard to the brook behind our house that drills down the mountain courtesy of a magnetic core at the center of the earth, reminds me that I always have a front row seat to spectacular simply because I am alive. I don’t need an all-access pass or pay extra to talk to God or godlike wonder after the show. We are the show.
We don’t have to sneak up on the stars. We can’t put one over on them, anyway. Plus, we don’t need to. Everything changes when we realize that everything out there, all of it, the infinite glory of the heavens, seemingly mysterious but surprisingly available, is actually gazing down upon each of us in wonder. It’s not that we are looking at them. They are looking at us, and maybe with love.
How do we know this is so?
How do we know it’s not?