A View of the Stars

“We are living through a major period of change in science, a paradigm shift from the idea of nature as inanimate and mechanical to a new understanding of nature as organic and alive.”
Rupert Sheldrake

Remember a time you gazed at the night sky
undimmed by city lights?
Perhaps you were on a ship at sea
or in the desert, or on a mountain top.
The Milky Way swirled with boldness.
You might have felt breathless or small,
awed by the glittery beauty,
amazed to see these thousands of pinpoints
inconceivably far away and
know there is nothing between us and them.
The path is filled with only dark matter.
 
The night after Pensacola battled
Hurricane Ivan,
the town lay in darkness,
and the stars looked down on us.
What did they see?
What do they see now as
we wage yet another battle with nature?
 
For nature lives and breathes in myriad forms—
planets, hurricanes, viruses, stars—
as surely as we do.