Aroostook Skies:
The sky of the free and the space of the brave
I’m wide awake … grinding sandy snow into my back. 6:10 a.m. Two frozen black tubes jut into my tearing eyeballs. The air remains terribly frigid, mercilessly penetrating any exposed crack in my snowsuit. The tubes magnify a small zone of sky near the stars of Bootes the Herdsman.
Desperately, the search continues for a small spot of fuzzy oblong light near familiar star patterns.
Nothing once, nothing twice, nothing three times. Game over. Comet Catalina must await more experienced and patient eyes than mine, perhaps in a darker sky in central Ohio or western Nebraska.
I lift up my tired torso. A narrow streak of foamy light tracks a narrow cloud of jet stuff. Friendly Father performs His morning rituals as the southeastern sky glows faithfully and brighter in yellow gold. My skins freeze as my soul soars. The black tubes magnify, my wonder wins. A silver-gold crescent Moon, like a warmly eaten wafer, coyly interrupts a conversation between Venus and Saturn while fiery Antares looks on slyly and stylishly like a burning cinnamon drop.
How I love to greet my friends. Morning arrives again in Aroostook County as glory declares obvious truth.
Now more than ever, we must reconfigure our purposes as individuals and as a community in our brave, new County. The beauty calls us cosmically to connect with the larger life purposes which elude every man, woman, and child today in towns across our northern numbers.
I am so concerned that we misunderstand the American freedom in which we format our daily lives. The freedoms we enjoy to choose or not to choose in performing our toiling tasks depend upon the work of unseen witnesses over the last 150 years or so. American men and women and children, unseen champions carved out the roads, the stores, and the schools which we still occupy.
None of the fresh air of freedom which animates our days arrived and rolled in upon what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to as the “wheels of inevitability.” I am convinced we must exercise freedom, like any other “muscle” to activate its benefits. Otherwise we simply ignore or blithely recognize our principles as a banal platitude for lukewarm assemblies.
Astronomy, my profession and passionate purpose, compels me to quicken my instincts for freedom. Frozen fingers and lonely vigils along with celestial searches remind me that I occupy a terrifying and trembling moment of life force in the face of an almost unimaginably dynamic and often fatally hostile Universe. Celestial realities initially mock our personal importance but, if come to the dawn, humbly we leave transformed initiated into the cosmic neighborhood.
I’m attempting to describe a sublime necessity.
Friends, we are not alone. I’m not speaking of extraterrestrial spaceships and star wars. My Secret Santa describes surrender; unconditionally to the hopes of a hallowed life. A rebirth of individual expression and creative freedom must now brighten our brains. The movement for acts of random kindness, the funny, “flash mob” perhaps points us to a direction, a guiding star.
Albert Einstein, in his later years, recognized this imperative. Participatory, creative, empowered democracy, to Einstein, represented the great legacy of Europe and strongly urged that America still held the card of the greatest opportunity for the ultimate day of a supranational government to finally lead all humanity to surrender its defensive self-importance and constant need for coercive aggression against our neighbors.
Perhaps the only buttress against the fearful power of the national or corporative collective stands the free man, the free woman, in quickened capacity to express the best of the human quest. Whether such an outlook remains naively visionary or religiously blasphemous remains subject to further reflection.
To my eye, astronomy then, in the final analysis, offers such an act of expression. We astronomers serve as local Prometheans, claiming a snatch of the cosmic fire to share with a cold community. If fate leads to a tortured capture, pinned to a lonely outcropping where eagles pick out the liver of our lives, well, as President Kennedy would say, “let the chips fall as they may.” The astronomer, the poet, the artist all enters the arena not as a popularity contest but as a truth test.
No, I’m not “The Martian” any longer. I returned today to Earth, the sum of many Adams each possessed with the dirt of their destiny, seeking the sunlight on successfully summon springtime.
Can we join together, this 2016, to carry through in an age of creature comforts and fierce necessities to find the high ground where Orion hangs majestically, Taurus towers tremendously, Gemini jumps for joy and Canis Major and Minor bark their brave barcarolles. Who can prevent Venus’ descent to find her home fire within a month inflamed by eastern morning twilight. Who can deny the return of ginormous Jupiter and sober Saturn, like elder brothers, to command the wee small hours with firm but friendly illumination?
If the personalized America we once cherished begins to vanish dramatically, who will sing the new anthem to the sky of the free and the home of space? Who will preserve the best American days and nights of our lives for those that follow into this brave new globalized economy? What will you do when you receive the call to stand and declare what you believe?
Larry Berz of Caribou is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
