October
By Andrew Smith

Lay on your back in the woods at night, and look up at the stars. Coyotes may howl around you, and the wind may hiss through shadows of pine, but the stars are silent. The Milky Way drifts across the darkened Heavens like glittering woodsmoke. The stars sparkle like fistfulls of briliant jewels, thrown from the hand of, whom?

Find the crescent moon, hanging low over the treetops, and remember that the crescent is caused by Earth casting its shadow on the moon, and that there are stars, planets and moons not just above you, but stretching out forever below you, and all around you too.

And then suddenly the universe becomes such an unfathomably immense place that you have to ask yourself what race of giants it was made for? Surely, not all this just for us? We, who start wars and kill our brothers over a mere acre of ground, when we are surrounded by an infinity we don't even see.

Ok. Now go back inside and watch some TV.Thinking like that will get you nowhere. You can't plant corn in infinity, or raise your family there. But it's there all the same, and if you think about it sometimes, it changes the meaning of everything.

Sometimes the stars look like dots to me, little white pin pricks in a flat, black board, too far away and insignificant to care about. Other times they sparkle with a mystery and beauty that defies description. We came from them. The Earth and everything on it is made from the dust of stars. They are not far from us, but we and they are the same.

And life itself may have first reached Earth riding on a meteor from deepest space. Scientists have found traces of amino acids and other compounds necessary to life on certain classes of meteors. The seeds of life may be scattering even now across ever more distant galaxies, falling upon fertile, but unfertilized, planets with the magic of a shooting star. But who knows?

There are so many things we do not, and cannot know. But in the end a sense of the mystery of the universe may be more important than a sense of knowledge about it. Knowledge we forget. Mystery we become.

I think that's why I like being out-of-doors. There's always at least a chance to feel the mystery of creation if you're anywhere under an open sky, out in the wind, up in the mountains.

The fluttering aspen leaves light the forest with October gold and release the musky, sweet sour perfume of a short summer into the autumn air. Choke cherries turn red and orange, summac brilliant scarlet. The seasons change. The stars do not.

It's the season for gathering wood, for flying kites, for climbing a mountain one last time before winter. It's the season of the hunt, the season of icy mornings and clear nights. It's the season for being outside.

Walking all day, over lonely ridges and across canyons, your muscles measure a bit of the distance around the world, a bit of the distance to the stars. Walk until your legs are tired, then lay down at night and look up to the Heavens. Feel the immensity of creation. And what a big, mysterious place we live in.

Then fall, softly, softly asleep.