LUCKY STARS

We do not at­tempt to count them, for it is an im­pos­si­ble un­der­tak­ing. I have had my fair share of close scrapes and es­capes in my life and, in bal­ance, it has been bliss to have lived the past two and a half decades in the peace, na­ture, com­mu­nity and beauty of The Pri­o­rat.

We will not leave. But in sens­ing our mor­tal­ity, we are going to down­size from a farm into a flat in town, for­sak­ing an al­most nightly un­der­lin­ing of Socrates’ words of such wis­dom. “All I know is that I know noth­ing. The only true wis­dom is in know­ing you know noth­ing. The un­ex­am­ined life is not worth liv­ing. There is only one good, knowl­edge, and one evil, ig­no­rance.”

With our com­muning, shar­ing time and space with won­der­ful peo­ple, we need to lis­ten to our bod­ies as they slow, and we will try to change, to ad­just our vi­sion to an urban ex­is­tence. An ed­i­fy­ing as­pect of that is say­ing good­bye to the un­fath­omable, the night sky. A sprin­kling of human il­lu­mi­na­tion will pol­lute – block out – our al­most nightly won­der at the stars, the vast span­gled can­vas that is be­yond com­pre­hen­sion.

Thank­fully, though, this part of the world is not over-lit, and al­most de­void of hor­ri­ble white light which I firmly be­lieve is un­set­tling and a hall­mark of fear. On cer­tain clear nights, if we are pa­tient and allow our eyes time to ad­just, the Milky Way spills across the sky and the plan­ets of our lit­tle solar sys­tem re­flect the sun’s light all the brighter. Right now they are align­ing – Venus, Jupiter and Sat­urn, along with the or­ange dot that is Mars. Uranus and Nep­tune are also part of the ce­les­tial pa­rade, but you’ll need a tele­scope to see them. Mer­cury will join in too, and such a gath­er­ing will not hap­pen again for an­other 15 years.

I can just about get my head around this and our am­bi­tions to ex­plore/ex­ploit, but the Milky Way galaxy of which we are part and also the plethora of lit­tle lights? There are bil­lions of other stars and their solar sys­tems. And if that is im­pos­si­ble to get your head around, they fig­ure The Milky Way is one of bil­lions of galax­ies that exist in the Uni­verse.

The near­est solar sys­tem to our own is Alpha Cen­tauri which, using the lat­est rocket trans­port, would take 80,000 years to reach (at 85,000 km per hour). The near­est ex­o­planet, pos­si­bly with a hab­it­able zone, was dis­cov­ered in 2016 by an in­ter­na­tional team of re­searchers led by Cata­lan Dr Guillem Anglada Escudé.

So we will have to walk out from the town and human il­lu­mi­na­tion into the wilder­ness of hu­mil­ity to stare, ex­am­ine and won­der, for a healthy re­minder of true wis­dom.