Pop 89: Garden in the sky
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
“We come from the stars, you know,” I say to my friend Page as he begins setting up his camera to take pictures of the night sky. Nowhere have I lived where the sky is so dense with starlight. The Grasslands at night smotes me breathless with its beauty. I stretch out on the hood of the car; the heat from the engine warms my back as the evening cools down. I prop a pillow under my head and gawk at the heavens on the cusp of this year’s Perseids shower, about to be reminded of how teeny-tiny me and my problems actually are.
“Uh-huh,” he says, “Joni got it right.” He’s concentrating on placing his camera, extending the legs of the tripod, tipping the lens slightly upward, prevaricating over exactly where to point the thing, even though he’s got a wide-angle lens capable of encapsulating the whole half-bowl of sky.
“We are stardust, we are golden, and we have to get ourselves back to the garden,” I sing from the iconic Woodstock song by Joni Mitchell. She wasn’t there, but she understood the urge - to get back to the beauty and harmony of a simple Edenic life, lived alongside plants and animals.
“But I’m not just referring to a 1960’s melody,” I say, “I’m reading Blair Stonechild’s book: ‘Loss of Indigenous Eden.” He writes about the story of the beginning of humanity that goes way, way back before the so-called ancient Greeks. The true ancients were - are - Indigenous, and they tell of people coming from the stars and - oh wow! Did you see that?”
A falling star arcs across the sky for a good three seconds, as long as it takes me to tell Page, he missed it. Then there’s another and another. I keep pointing up, and he keeps happening to be looking in the opposite direction. I continue: “Stonechild says why should we believe the Earth was created in seven days or that we come from some biological ooze anymore than we come from the stars? I mean, when it comes to the soul descending into the body, why couldn’t we come from out there?”
“Why not?” Page finally steps away from his camera and presses the shutter release for a long exposure. “Do you know how stars are made?”
“An agent with good connections, a PR machine and lots of money.”
“Funny. Actually, if I remember correctly, in the early stages of the universe, the only two elements that existed were hydrogen and helium.”
“’If I remember correctly’,” I laugh, quoting him, “Like you were there!”
“Then, a billion years after the Big Bang, loose floating matter formed nearly 100 billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Then, when those stars exploded, they created new carbon-producing stars. And of course - if you recall the Coneheads - we are carbon-based units.”
“Of course.” We go quiet for a second. I can never wrap my brain around the numbers. And how time and space become the same thing when you’re talking such massive distances. “Can you remind me how close the nearest star to us is?”
“Proxima Centari is 4.25 light years away. And light travels at 186,000 miles a second.”
“Right. So, when we look out at all these stars, we are looking at the past.”
“We’re looking at light that left that particular star 4.25 years ago. For all we know, it could be gone now, but we won’t know for 4.25 years.”
“It’s hard to make sense of any of this.”
“Well, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson says: The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
Tyson is the astrophysicist who supplies Page - and millions of other lovers of the cosmos - with his astronomical facts and figures. And Tyson is right. The universe is a Great Mystery, no matter which creation myth you warm to. If with our limited cranial capacity, we think we can articulate its full unspeakable magnificence, if we think we’ve got a handle on it and can make sense of it, then we have lost our sense of wonder and would make lousy scientists, mystics or storytellers. Not to mention, we’d be pompous louts.
Still, it helps to read Stonechild and DeGrasse to appreciate the many poetic ways we touchingly attempt to speak the unspeakable. Like when Tyson writes, in ‘Astrophysics for People in a Hurry’: nearly 14 billion years ago, “all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the universe sat in something less than one-trillionth the size of the period at the end of this sentence.”
“Stonechild writes that the end of time depends not on the earth but upon the heavenly realm,” I say to Page, still taking long exposures of the sky. “He says time will not end until those who have finished experiencing their physical essence have found their way back to spirit. He says the body has a 1000 wills, the spirit only one - to go back to where it came from.
“Like Joni says: We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
“It’s like, we’re just specks,” I sigh. “But at the same time, we’re here for far more important pursuits than chasing fame and fortune.” Silence. “Someone really oughta tell the Kardashians.” More silence. “Sometimes these questions, about spirit and mystery, they keep me up at night. What about you?”
“What keeps me up at night is wondering if Elias Petterson’s injury will keep him out of the lineup.”
“Of course,” I say. We joke that we can never have a conversation without Page mentioning the NHL. And it’s a red letter day if he can squeeze in The Alamo. So, under the sublime rainbow of the Milky Way, he adds: “But then I just do what I’ve done since I was twelve; I imagine myself on the ramparts, heroically defending the Alamo. Only I haven’t died yet.”