These past few days I have been aware of how overhead the meteors are sizzling, though we can’t see or hear them. Apparently this year’s Perseid meteor shower is especially intense, with some 200 shooting stars an hour at the peak, instead of merely 80 per hour, the norm.
Here in New England it’s been cloudy in the evenings, so I have not been able to see the shooting stars…but I’ve been thinking about how the meteor showers happen 24 hours a day, whether or not we see them. Just because they’re blotted out by the brilliance of the Sun doesn’t mean they’re not happening.
Somehow I have been able to sense the whoosh of the meteors during the day, as the Sun burns mercilessly overhead; as well as at night, through the blankness of my ceiling, despite the grind of the air conditioner that is the only thing making this heat wave bearable.
Every few seconds: whoosh, there goes another one!
Even though I know the shooting stars are meteors, it still seems, when I see one, like I am watching a “star” detach itself from the dark heavens and fling itself across the blackness of space.
Lately I have been restless, wanting that freedom, the ability to detach myself from the background and streak forwards towards an unknown destination. This is strange for me, as I have been someone who has hung on firmly to my corner of the universe for my whole life, very rarely venturing beyond the borders of what I know and love.
I have the sense that maybe I’m not alone in this.
It seems like we are once again entering a time to “let our freak flags fly,” as Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young put it during the tumultuous 1960s. Time to let go of the customs and habits we’ve accepted as normal, and held on to as if they were the answer to the question we were never taught to ask.
Question: If you’re born as a human being, what is your life all about? Why are you here? What are you meant to be doing with your “one precious life” (Mary Oliver)?
To some degree, I think the answer is both simpler and more complex than we might expect.
We are here to be the soul of the Earth, the anima mundi, the means by which the planet can see, hear, touch, feel and understand herself. The other living beings perform this function too, of course. But only Homo sapiens, so far, has the ability to see into the future and evaluate the past. Through our amazing technological ability, we can foresee when the meteor shower will come, not just this year but for the years to come as well. And we can record the beauty of these showers, in writing and in images, preserving the present moment for posterity in a way that was never possible before we showed up on the planet.
We have a unique capacity to manipulate time, we humans. For better or worse, we are aware of the past and the future as well as the present moment.
I am not sure that this is really a blessing. I might be happier if I could simply detach myself and fly, like a meteor, without worrying about everything leading up to this moment, and everything that will result from my choice to let go.
In my memoir I wrote about an August night long ago when I went to watch shooting stars with a friend up on a dark hillside, just the two of us lying on a tarp, under a blanket, our warm bodies a counterpoint to the cold brilliance of the shooting stars overhead.
That night I chose not to become the lover of my companion; we went our separate ways. Does the memory of that August meteor shower haunt him as it does me? Does he feel the soul connection we made that night, still firm and unshakeable despite more than 30 years gone by?
I feel the meteors shooting across the sky all day, all night, though I cannot see them. Does that make them any less real?
Maybe it is time to detach ourselves from the tyranny of believing only what we see. Maybe it is time, despite our media obsessions, to give more credit to what we feel with our mind’s eye, with our hearts and souls.
Whoosh, there goes another one! Did you see it? Did you feel it? There it goes!
Transition Times 