When I was six, I lived in an apartment in Queens with a large balcony. I’d often go out there at night just to stare at the moon. I’d lie on my back and feel the cold concrete of the balcony against me while a cool breeze blew over me, Jamaica Bay in the distance. I’d spend hours quietly staring at the moon until bedtime, overcome by the moon’s beauty, eventually being moved to tears. I distinctly recall the heartache I felt when I realized I’d never get to step foot on the moon.
I was deeply drawn to space as a child. Not in the way some kids are where they learn everything about each planet, space missions, and galaxies — but by its mystery and unreachable beauty. Sadly, I never saw the stars very clearly growing up in New York. Sometimes, I’d catch a glimpse of the Little Dipper from my apartment window. But those opportunities were few and far between.
I first saw the sky clearly when I was about 10 years old during a summer vacation in Honduras, a small Central American country from which my family hails. My aunt and I were walking in the late evening when I glanced up at the sky. I shouted, “El cielo! Tia el cielo!” before going completely silent. You could tell my aunt was shocked at my reaction — after all, how had I not noticed the sky before? But this was the first time I had looked up and not been immersed in light pollution — or at least old enough to notice the difference.
The sky was glowing in blues, pinks, and purples. It wasn’t this flat layer of dusty black I had grown accustomed to seeing in New York. Layers of colors and light twinkled, shined, and glowed. It was breathtaking. I stood there for what felt like an eternity, just staring at it. I’m thankful to my aunt for not rushing the moment. I’ve never forgotten that night’s sky.
About 15 years later, I’d take a trip to Israel. I wandered out to the Negev desert to lay in its chilly darkness one night. I stared up at the sky, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, and there it was again: endless layers of glowing light. I lay there, with my back against the sand and dirt, rocky formations surrounding me, cradling me like an infant as I stared up at the sky and felt the smallest I ever felt. I stared up at infinity, the twinkling and glow of lights shining down at me, filling my pupils with light emitted centuries and millennia ago.
I found myself intoxicated and confronted by a ceaseless stream of juxtapositions. I was in awe of how infinite the darkness seemed and just how many stars there were. I knew this, of course. I knew that stars were innumerable from high school textbooks and copies of National Geographic magazines that my dad poured over when I was a kid. However, I was unable to intellectualize just how innumerable, or what being innumerable actually looked like, until I was confronted with it. This inability to count the stars, to easily quantify them, and to place a concrete number on their vastness was terrifying. How could a place exist so vast, so expansive, that it held all the largest and smallest stars, planets, and galaxies? How could a planet so small exist, one that held all of human history, all the love, all the hate, all the wars, all the peace, all the hope, all the sorrow, all the woe, all the joy? How could Earth, and I with it, just float about in this vastness, circling around an orbit, surrounded by all these other beautiful celestial bodies — and it was not the center of it all. It was not the biggest of them all. It was not the oldest of them all. It wasn’t all of it. Just a little piece, a little rock.
This smallness underscored a triviality, a sense of “jokes on you,” that completely shattered my ego while simultaneously building it back up. I was raised in a religious household that believed, “dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” But while I had questioned faith most of my life, at that moment, this idea felt real — I recognized that from the dust I came and felt oddly comforted by and sure that to the stars I would return. I knew in my bones — and in my genetic makeup — that as I stared at the stars I also stared back at my ancestors, that I was communing with them and all those who would come after me. I knew that I was nothing and everything, and that I always would be — yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Just like space expands, pulling and stretching galaxies farther apart, life has a way of pulling us apart and away, a force exerted against the things that make us feel whole. We drift away from the simple, from awe.
As an adult, I’ve craved that feeling of simultaneous insignificance and eternal greatness that I once felt in the Negev. I find it occasionally when I look at my son and can somehow see all my family’s faces and my husband’s family smiling back at me. It is when I see my face reflected in his, when I see that little girl on the balcony in Queens, the awe-struck 10-year-old in Honduras, the 25-year-old in the Negev, that I am reminded to look up once again.
That’s all it takes, sometimes — to look up.
Cultcha 