Our cosmic connection

Abstract

It’s five in the morning the week of the winter solstice and the temperature is lower than the hour. Three of us are making a trek that will eventually take us up the far western wall of the canyon, and all of it under the light of a thousand shining stars. The trail we follow winds through scrub brush and over frozen washes, past a pictograph of a thousand-year-old stellar spectacle and up onto a lonely plateau where we’ll find half-buried stone walls and ceremonial sites that have lain there largely undisturbed for eleven hundred years. We make this trip in the cold and the dark to be there at sunrise on this week of the shortest day of the year. What we hope to see at that moment is perhaps what brought the first people here so long ago, and what, as is evidenced by our very presence, still brings them today: a connection to the cosmos around us.

But the stars throng out in their glory, And they sing of the God in man; They sing of the Mighty Master, Of the loom his fingers span, Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole, And weft in the wonderous plan. Robert W. Service ‘The Three Voices’