There I was, sitting on a bench, on a wooden deck by the side of a lake. It is the middle of October and fall has started setting in Alabama. As I sat there, looking straight ahead where the sunset had left some golden aura in the cloudless sky, slowly the planets started shining. It was the exact but large-scale projection of my dear ol' planetarium in Calcutta. The smoky skies of Calcutta was never a nice place for watching stars and from my dorm patio, though you can have a great view of dazzling Birmingham, finding stars in the sky is a real ordeal. So when, I looked up to the clear sky over Lake Martin, I gave a gasp as I found the constellations taking shape...In Calcutta, a huge hospital guarded the view of the northern sky from my home. So I have never really seen the Pole Star. Yesterday, I found it shining above the branches of some distant trees. The North Star.... how nice it feels to look at it...some point that is fixed, and the stars revolve round it all through the year. Near the North Star were the constellations of Lyra, Cygnus and Aquila, forming the Summer Triangle. Vega always reminds me of Carl Sagan's story Contact, more so because recently I was reading it once more. There were Andromeda and Cassiopea, the lady on the chair and some more northern star patterns. In the south, Venus and Jupiter traced the cetestial equator on which one could see the amazing zodiac constellations.
It is not just the science, not the nuclear physics or the astrophysics that is important, but the stars, the presence of them fills me with awe and wonder. I feel s
o small in front of them...so tiny that my wordly feelings seem to just vanish. But, on the other hand I feel so special that I have got a chance to experience all these...Someone made me like this, with a unique identity and that is what I can feel when I am alone amidst the stars... as our poet said, I feel awestruck at the thought that I have been born as a human in this world full of different varieties of life and the Universe full of stars...and yesterday, the world seemed to be sleeping, not a sound could be heard apart from the soft lapping of water on the beach...I was there alone...facing my Creator...I felt a deep sense of happiness and fullness from within.
It is not just the science, not the nuclear physics or the astrophysics that is important, but the stars, the presence of them fills me with awe and wonder. I feel s
o small in front of them...so tiny that my wordly feelings seem to just vanish. But, on the other hand I feel so special that I have got a chance to experience all these...Someone made me like this, with a unique identity and that is what I can feel when I am alone amidst the stars... as our poet said, I feel awestruck at the thought that I have been born as a human in this world full of different varieties of life and the Universe full of stars...and yesterday, the world seemed to be sleeping, not a sound could be heard apart from the soft lapping of water on the beach...I was there alone...facing my Creator...I felt a deep sense of happiness and fullness from within.
1 comment:
nice pictures... I agree, Lake Martin is beautiful!
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