Bright Lights
It’s August 12 in 2024. If you’d had a clear sky this morning and looked off in the direction of the constellation Perseus, you might have seen meteors making their way through space, perhaps encountering Earth’s atmosphere before burning up. They do this every year about this time. For me, at least, all the meteor showers are markers in time (though the concept of time itself is pretty iffy). In the case of the Perseids, the comet Swift-Tuttle gives off a lot of debris. As we pass through that cloud of debris, space dust, we see pieces of that debris fall into the atmosphere. Sometimes, you get really lucky and see an Earth-grazing Fireball (where the meteor enteres the Earth’s atmosphere and then bounces back out). I’ve only seen one. It was unforgettable.
At each meteor shower, I’m older. At each shower, it’s likely the weather is changing. I’m changing. My relationships have changed. These markers are reminders that I’ve aged. My hands and movements are slower, and less precise. My thoughts, too, are less precise. I’m more forgetful. Sometimes, I’m more easily distracted from my goals by my discursive mental apparatus. All these reminders of my age leave me feeling a little melancholy. I already have an innate tendency toward depression.
Then, a meteoric moment comes along. We pass through a beautiful, good, debris cloud left from one of life’s constellations. Someone reaches out to say, I love you, in a way they never have before. Someone sends an email saying, Hey, I remember when you did this. We get a text phrased in a way that surprises us, given our relationship to a person over a lifetime. It is as though we passed through the tailings, the accumulation of storied debris in one of Life’s Constellations. Somewhere, along the line, things switched up. We see things anew. The people in our lives see things differently. All these things contribute to our clarity: our health, the health of the people we’ve loved, the accumulation of losses, and the futility of our private wars. When we make such changes in thought, the Mountains of our Anger and Angst shifts. They aren’t even molehills any more. If we’ve chosen to see them as they are, to release them, to let them go, they can become stardust. A debris field that holds memories which surface every so often. They can become glorious and beautiful.
Here’s hoping the skies are clear so you can see your own meteors: in space or in your life.