This
Sky
Where we live
Is no place to lose your wings.
So love, love,
Love.
Hafiz
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky
I’ve fallen in love again. My heart is newly besotted with a love that is as ageless as love itself – the night sky!
I am not alone in this love, nor do I need to be. The night sky is so immense that she holds every speck of life that is and ever has been. All the beauty arises out of her darkness – even the rising of the sun and emergence of new light shimmering on the hillsides and treetops. And, like the glorious color of sunsets, all beauty surrenders back into her embrace, leaving sparkling remembrances glistening in the dark.
With one glimpse upward, I too disappear into her boundless presence. There, there is a sense of spaciousness that, instead of feeling eerily empty, feels endlessly neutral. Within that neutrality there is the community of life, sharing breath and the grace of embodiment. There would be no me without my human ancestry, as well as the sun, earth, waters, plants, microbes and countless interactions and experiences.
Within this love, there is a subtle hum of prayerful inter-reverence. The ocean sways in sync with the dance of the sunlight on the surface of the moon. Together, stars become constellations guiding patterns of travel across the ocean. Birdsongs fluidly harmonize with the ebb and flow of darkness and light. I feel invited into the living realm of sacred interconnection and reciprocity where every gesture is a gift and an offering.
Just as I find the night sky as home, I let her vast beauty reside in my heart. This is not a new feeling of a loving kinship with the heavens and other beings. I was graced with that sensibility in the first decade of my life. After trying the opposite way of being with a lens of separateness, I‘ve returned to the night sky where I’m letting her slowly teach me to grow the will power for steadily offering praises to the most invisible part of her – the divine.
I hope you will join me and fall in love with the night sky. Perhaps together we can re-ignite our collective connection and reverence for all life.
Practice
This practice supports awareness of inner night sky. Instead of this practice, you can simply gaze into the night sky with a sense of taking in the whole sky at once (without grasping or labeling what you see, just feeling).
Prepare –
- Turn your phone and any other devices to airplane mode, and remove any digital devices from your wrists or around your neck unless they are for medical reasons.
- Find a comfortable seated position.
- Gently rub your palms together until you feel some warmth, especially in your fingertips.
- Then, gently close your eyes and lightly rest the tips of your first two fingers of each hand over your eyelids, and lightly press the tip of your thumbs over your ear flap. The remaining two fingers (ring and little finger of each hand) can softly rest on your cheeks.
- With your eyes and ears softly sealed with your fingers, softly hum for a minute or so. Invite awareness of the reverberation of the sound in your skull and maybe into your throat and body.
- Lower your hands and allow them to rest in a position that is comfortable for you. Invite a softness through your wrists, forearms and palms. Sit quietly for a few moments, coming back to the invitation for softening through your hands.
Practice –
- While still seated, allow the backs of your hands to gently rest on your thighs, continuing to invite softness in your palms and fingertips. Your eyes may be closed or in a soft gaze.
- Imagine you are sitting on a mountain top on a warm summer night.
- Imagine the night sky is all around you: you feel safe and comforted by the sky’s quiet and soft presence behind, above and wrapping around your sides and across your frontal body.
- Perhaps recall that gentle hum. Invite the feeling it is universe’s eternal lullaby reaching across time and space, belonging to no one or nothing but ever-present.
- Pause here, inviting in the sense of being soaked in the immensity of existence.
- You may pause with the above feeling as long as is comfortable for you. Then, to begin to close your practice, lift your palms upward and slightly outward to about chest height.
- Invite a sense that majestic spaciousness is pouring into your palms, up through your wrists and arms, into your upper torso and into your heart center.
- As the spaciousness fills your heart, invite the feeling that you are filled with a love so great that it flows back out through your heart, upper torso, arms, hands and fingertips.
- With your open palms, there is the flow of giving and receiving the generous and loving spaciousness of the night sky. This love is always there and has always been there, deep within you and spread across the universe.
- Raise your hands a little more upward, offering gratitude for the moments of joy and beauty that are like night stars in your everyday life.
- Slowly bring your palms together and place them in front of your heart. Imagine you are sealing in this gift of the eternal presence of the night sky within and without.
Transition back into your day –
- Pause with your hands in front of your heart.
- Slowly lower your hands in any position that is comfortable. Invite a few easy breaths.
- When you are ready, return to your day.
This poem appears in Mala of Love: 108 Luminous Poems, page 4, edited by Ravi Nathwani and Kate Vogt and published by New World Library. Photo is by Jeremy Thomas. H E A R T H is posted each new and full moon. KateVogt©2024.
If you’d like further inspiration, please consider reflection on the following poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet —
all this universe, to the furthest stars and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.
Please consider joining me for one of my upcoming courses on Zoom:
Transcendental Love – January 28-February 25 (5 Tuesdays, 3:10-4:30 p.m. PT).
Universal Values – March 27-April 10 (3 Thursdays, 3:10-4:30 p.m. PT).
