Between loneliness and awe

Many nights, as the summer days fade into the fall, I find myself going outside before bed, staring up at the largest piece of the night sky I can find and thinking of my mom and dad. It's not something that I ever plan and find no logic behind it. Still, I am drawn there from somewhere inside me.

The few people that know me at all would not consider me a religious man. And it's true. I don't feel much of a connection to any western religion and I most assuredly am not a Christian. For me the organized religions are just man-made expressions of a persons soul, a contrived outlet for the emergence of an inner spirit, and while I agree that it serves most folks for the exploration of their spiritual quests, for me it is too limiting. My path is the pure expression of that yearning, an impulse of my humanity that must be explored. It's why I run. It seems no matter when or where we have lived our lives on this Earth, we have strived to satisfy that internal desire to face the ultimate truth and most of us do so by embracing the most available religion. That's fine. Their common threads bind us. Our need to embrace them is as natural as our desire for love and sex and food. But none of them have worked for me.

So I go outside.

Last year, while I was putting away my mom's things shortly after her passing, I came across a small scrap of paper tucked in the pocket of an old full length coat that she had hung in the closet near her front door. Her pockets, as I had discovered earlier that day, were places to expect to find only old tissues and so I had almost not bothered to look. But there it was. I bent it's warped pages back into shape and then began to read. It was in the script her handwriting had become in her last years, not elegant and "pretty" as it had once been. This was barely legible, the tremors and shaking of her hand moving the pen about the page in a jagged jerky fashion as she wrote. I'm sure she was frustrated. I imagined when she must have written it, earlier that winter I supposed, out somewhere and maybe feeling emotional and obviously alone and wanting to say something to her kids. Her kids who were now nowhere near. She left each of us with a short private thought and then near the end of the scrap of paper she said that after she was gone, she would be watching over us.

That's where she pictured herself going. Somehow released from her miserable and broken body, set free amongst the clouds and dancing between the stars and finally being able to protect and look after the children that had grown and left her loving embrace. In death, she believed, she could once again offer the protection to us that in life she was so powerless to provide, and in that she found comfort. For her, this was no imagined or irrational fear. She had already lost a son and so lived that nightmare every day.

Now the sky has a different significance to me when I think of my dad because he is the one that taught it to me. On countless summer nights we would go out on the driveway, necks craned back, eyes pointed skyward while he took me on a tour of the heavens. For my 10th birthday he bought me a telescope and built a custom box to hold it's lenses and prisms. We would spend hours outside, sometimes staying up past midnight, until the entire sphere was utterly familiar. No constellation was too small, no star cluster too insignificant, we looked at them all and I knew all their stories. The spaces between the sports figures on my Pee Chee folders were filled with my accurate doodles of star patterns. My dad wasn't always the greatest guy back in those days, but the time we spent on that driveway together was some of the best.

So I go outside.

Not because of notes from an old pocket or even memories of standing beside my dad while he pointed from star to star. Instead it's something from within. An urging from my soul, and a calling from an ancient place. A place between loneliness and awe. And a need to go out, stare up at the heavens and tell my parents goodnight.