'I Wasn't Looking At You, I Was Looking Through You'

The sky reveals more stars where I go to seek refuge.

There, the only light in the sky is if there's a high school football game up the road.

And from there, I gain a fuller understanding.

The smaller celestial bodies -- the ones that are dimmer, fainter, weaker.

It's rare that I ever see them.

But it's there that I do, and they compel me to see something I've never seen, if seeing is the way to describe it.

Their dimness. Their faintness. Their weakness. Outshined by the brighter orbs of energy.

I've been missing the point.

The sky isn't a dark tapestry painted with lighter and darker and bigger and smaller specks of light. It isn't a drawing or a painting or a schematic or a progression of notes.

This is an all-encompassing space, functioning with laws within laws within laws.

From the largest scale expansion of the universe to the smallest elements of quantum physics, where an entire universe functions within an atom.

Countless potential dimensions.

But until now, I've not gotten past the third one.

This is living. This is accepting.

This, the ability to be aware of the space you fill and the space between you and everything else ... that's the recognition of our intimate role in the expanse.

We make constellations of our immediate celestial neighbors. Big and little serving utensils. Half-men-half-horse creatures. I've spent more time pointing out the faint stars that barely make out Orion's penis than looking beyond connecting the dots like a children's menu at Applebee's.

What of these barely visible dots of light?

These are the blemishes. The pieces of sand on the photograph.

Or ...

Now ...

The truth of the space between everything.

The living space.

And the understanding that we are as close as we choose to believe and as far as we are afraid to be.