Aroostook Skies
By Larry Berz
The Chinese ironically declare: “May you live in interesting times.” I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel a sense of personal and collective necessity as we bid farewell to 2016. But first … Christmas.
For some years, I find myself formatting my sense of “holiday” to a plateau of sacred trust between myself, my loved ones, and of course you in my community. Sure, the calendar might declare Christmas Day on Sunday, December 25th, but I now truly believe that doesn’t assure that you arrive at that place of mind and heart called Christmas just because the wall display says so cursively and cutely.
To enter into the sanctity of Christmas really requires a journey of increasing awareness of some force filling the “God” void within each of us. I find it rather exciting to consider the possibility that an ethic that answers outside of myself, the ethic that answers outside of myself actually wants me (and you, too) to join the party, the advent of new being, and a joyful being at that … not just a human being.
Christmas really exists (like Santa Claus) and much more importantly, especially for tired, jaded adults who know it all (“sabelotodo” in Spanish), we can each year at that moment choose to rise above the purely routine. If nothing else, Christmas should never, ever seem routine. It’s a God-given opportunity to risk the vulnerability of love and forgiveness and yes, wonder. That opportunity remains particularly poignant in 2016 when an overabundance of fear, instability, and seismic events seem poised to paralyze our personal and collective best.
Yes, wonder … Are you, by the way, looking up at night in the mid-bleak December? So much wonder awaits you in the early evening Aroostook skies. Start with that illuminated desire — Venus. The Evening Star lives up to its top billing in December, surely turning heads as it decorates the southwestern skies for several hours after those oh so early solstice sunsets.
Like all beauty, Venus offers shades of unique splendor throughout the changing call of day to night. The most sharp eyed may even resolve the planet in broad daylight as a sublime diamond spark of light in a tender blue and bitter sky. As twilight incrementally shifts in light and shadow and color, Venus adjusts correspondingly, a champion without peer. How strange and ironic that by scratching just underneath the surface to deeper astronomical insight, we discover just how inhospitable our sister world emerges for future human adventure.
About a “friendly fist” eastwards and somewhat higher resides a much dimmer yet distinctly orange clad planet point: Mars. What a perfect and spectacular display awaits you on the first clear night of January of the New Year 2017 as the sublime crescent waxing moon approaches the two terrestrial planets. It’s a study in scale, considering the distances and sizes of all three worlds to challenge the humdrum yet furious routine which drives us all. Check it out, warmly.
Then comes the fine phalanx of Winter constellations in full glory: Orion, Taurus, Gemini, Canis Major, Canis Minor, and Auriga. I spent a breathtaking retreat upon Limestone’s now snowball field and stood in the importance of awe just gazing at those stars during the recent cold. What could declare God’s glory more than those diamonds against a velvet backdrop? As a strong writer once penned, “I have loved the stars too much to be afraid of the dark.”
Which leads me to my real topic: “night fright”. Regrettably, with the rise of fearfulness in our society, untold numbers of ordinary people seem shackled if not blinded to the safety of a light polluted universe. The saturation of artificial lighting dispelling the “darkness” can only diminish our sense of freedom in an astronomical cosmos. Next time you turn on the head lights for night travel, consider the blaze of lighting which attracts your purposes, from parking lots to garage doorways to excessive holiday decorations to urban office buildings. When 90 percent of people never experienced the awesome majesty of the Milky Way arching overhead, what can this state of affairs bode for our overall understanding of the human context within the glory of God? And more important, how can we invite our children and grandchildren into the reality (not virtual) of an awesome Universe while concurrently engendering in that humility a more compassionate and kinder community and Aroostook sky?
Larry Berz of Caribou is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
