By Cathy Hird

Many of these early fall days have been glorious. Warm sun on the face under the expanse of blue. Trees tipped with red. The swamp in front of our house vibrates and sings with the birds who are gathering for the flight south.

Nights have been stunning. The cool air is clear of humidity, and clouds have been banished. With no moon to interfere, the stars have taken over. They are usually not this clear except in February when the sharp cold chases us inside. These nights, I can linger to admire the brilliant beauty.

The stream of the milky way makes a clear path running from one corner of the horizon to the other. It almost seems to touch the earth at both ends. Constellations jump out at me. The two dippers seem closer than anything else in the sky.

The blinking lights of planes cross the patterns, and I've seen one falling star just out of the corner of my eye. Mostly, the dome of the sky stands still above me just out of reach.

The moon is growing every evening, masking a few more stars. I am up early, and when I let the cat out the stars do not seem quite as bright, and they have shifted position a little. But in the night, I can imagine why some ancient people felt that the sky was a dome that sheltered us. I can comprehend the medieval idea that there were several domes which made music as they turned above the world.

There is another part of me that loves to look at pictures of binary stars taken by gigantic telescopes. I peruse images from the Hubble telescope showing distant galaxies and glorious gas clouds. I understand the Doppler effect that tells us that the stars are racing away from each other and from us. I read science fiction, the stories that imagine what might be if and when we can travel to those distant places.

But standing in my yard with the house between me and any lights, I am uplifted by the view. Knowing how far away the pinpoints of light really are speaks to me of unimaginable distances. But because the beauty touches my spirit, because the sky feels like it is just out of my reach, I do not feel small. Humble yes, but not tiny.

Knowing that the universe is huge could make me feel insignificant. Knowing that it is flying apart could make me feel helpless and dismayed. But there is a pattern in the sky that comforts and reassures me.

I know that the patterns the ancient Greeks named in the sky are only visible from the perspective of earth and because the stars are moving they will eventually shift even in our sky. But I know that all the stars I see are part of the same galaxy. I know that the milky way is a spiralling collection of stars placed in a pattern by gravity and other forces an astrophysicist would have to explain. I know that some of those pinpricks of light are other galaxies just as interesting as ours.

Astronomers look for signs of planets among the stars. We wonder if there is life out there, and what shape that life might have. With that many stars in our galaxy and all those others, I imagine there are creatures whose form none of us would expect.

How did the universe come to be? The theory of a big bang explains some things we see, not everything. The opening of the book of Genesis describes a chaotic mess moving toward light and order, suggests that a divine energy directed the formation of the universe. Speculating about the beginning of everything is interesting.

Mostly though, I do not need to know how this came to be. The night sky is. Always the stars call to my spirit, my heart. Each night when the sky is clear, I walk under a shimmering veil of sky and look up.

Cathy Hird is a farmer, minister and writer living near Walters Falls.