Everyday Canvas

Stars

Prompt: Stars in the sky.
Write about stars in the sky for your Blog entry today.

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Stars are fascinating. If they weren't there except for our sun, we would be looking at a blank black space over us at night, but then, this thought is absurd, too. The sky is like a multi-layered scale with each galaxy of stars holding it in place and our sun depends on other heavenly objects in order to exist.

Leaving my faulty assumptions alone, stars were always regarded, by us humans, as magnificent, intriguing, but far-away lights. The earliest ideas I can think of came from Pythagoras and Plato who contemplated their significance in the cosmos. Other older civilizations just worshipped them. I guess worshipping stuff we don't know much about comes easier to us humans.

Today, in our time, stars have given way to scientific thought and inquiry and existential reflection. That must be why Carl Sagan said, "We are made of star-stuff."

Maybe so. A star, just like us, is born as a nebula, which collapses and forms a protostar. during this pre-star period, when its center's nuclear fusion reaches 10 million degrees Celcius (Thank you Wikipedia), it ignites and goes into several following sequences of becoming a star.

Then again, just like us, stars live out their lives until they die. This is because their births and deaths are essential for the evolution of universe. In a similar fashion, the presence of the stars connects us directly to the universe, creating a sense of unity in all things, accompanied by awe.

Immanuel Kant speaks of this awe, in his "Critique of Pure Reason," by pointing to the “starry heavens above” as one of the two things that fill the mind with reverence and admiration. For the same reason, stars are often metaphors in poetry as they are always so inspirational.

As far back as I could go, In Aeneid, book 5, Virgil says, "the shining orb of the moon and the Titan sun, the stars://an inner spirit feeds them, coursing through all their limbs,//mind stirs the mass and their fusion brings the world to birth."

Then, Omar Khayyam finds meaning in the sky in his Rubaiyyat. "Wake! For the Sun, who scattered into flight//The Stars before him from the Field of Night,//Drives Night along with them from Heav’n and strikes//The Sultán’s Turret with a Shaft of Light."

Some has seen the stars as unreachable, like some loves and ideals, as in the lines of a 1939 poem titled Stars by Keith Douglas. "...Yes, we look up with pain//at distant comrades and plains we cannot tread."

So many poems on stars, and in each era of human thought that we know about...Yet, we only have, for now, our earth, which is a very tiny planet in the vast universe. For that reason and maybe because I think of myself as lower-ranked and somewhat humble , I think I'll end up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti's The world is a beautiful place
"The world is a beautiful place // to be born into // if you don’t mind happiness// not// always being //so very much fun//if you don’t mind a touch of hell//now and then."

Now, am I being world-ly or what!