Looking at Storms, Icebergs, and The Night Sky
In the weeks since the eclipse, and in the days after the Sun–Neptune conjunction, life has felt quieter, less loud.
Not diminished. Just less saturated.
In this period of threshold energy, I have noticed:
- Ideas being lived rather than planned.
- Patterns weaving silently beneath the chatter.
- The body signalling readiness before the mind speaks.
- Creative work waiting for internal alignment.
Since the rain paused for a few nights, I have been sitting on the deck chair in the back veranda, looking up.
The sky is clearer than it has been in months.
There is something stabilizing about constellations. They do not perform. They do not persuade. They do not trend. They simply remain in relation to one another across vast time scales. The mind recalibrates when it remembers that.
This week, a new high-resolution image of the Milky Way was released, revealing structural detail that was previously unresolved — filaments, dust lanes, luminous clusters mapped with astonishing precision. You can see it here: New image reveals secrets of the Milky Way galaxy in stunning detail .
At the same time, six planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Neptune and Uranus - are visible in the night sky in a rare alignment, a slow celestial procession that will be visible for several days on either side of the night of February 28: Six planets due to parade across night sky in rare celestial spectacle .
It is easy to treat these as spectacle.
But they are not spectacle. They are orientation.
I also read an interview with Camille Seaman: Eye of the Storm — Portraits of Weather and Reckoning . She speaks of weather not as background but as presence, as something that shapes the body and demands humility. To stand before a storm and photograph it is not conquest; it is reckoning.
Looking at the sky from my veranda is not dramatic. No expedition. No extreme climate. Just night air and a deck chair.
And yet the gesture is similar.
To look up is to interrupt self-importance.
To look long enough is to feel scale re-enter the nervous system.
Polymathy is not accumulation of disciplines. It is the capacity to let astronomy, neuroscience, photography, weather, and lived experience sit in one cognitive field without forcing hierarchy.
The nervous system under influence narrows.
The nervous system under orientation widens.
The stars widen it.
Tonight, I am less interested in producing and more interested in perceiving.
Integration sometimes looks like this:
not writing about the sky,
but sitting beneath it
until thought reorganizes itself.
[photo: © Camille Seaman, Midnight Sunset, Lemaire Channel, Antarctica 14 January 2017]
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