Soft starlight journeyed past the region of the moon's luminosity and twinkled into his eye, becoming clearer to him as the moon winked once before descending behind the volcano's rim. This is the way it was in the beginning. These stars burning to a mythical ash every day, their radiance layering a residue upon his being, night upon night. Tonight the expansion of light, stoking an ember of memory, ignited a powerful wonder. Before him...before his fire...He stretched out with the reach of a thousand lifetimes. The sky, the stars remained.Pondering, he withdrew the folded paper with its scratches and symbols from his pouch. Though the path was well trodden and he had occurrence to frequent its meandering, the map offered clarity along the way. The chill night air condensed the moment, from his crouch, he drew his legs in tighter for warmth.
The sky's immensity began to lull him. Drifting, known sunrises and sunsets filled his mind like an expanding spiral. Presently the precession took in the seasons, the stars, and then in a flash...all light -- ancient and modern -- wound around the moment.
Hearing and understanding an unlearned language setting markers upon the celestial wheel, he felt the brevity of his observations run upon the scope of the eternal.
Quietly he opened into a higher perspective as the whirling acquired patterned meaning...then, the discovery of pathlight! He watched as the sun eclipsed twelve star groups. Pisces in Spring became Gemini in summer unto Virgo in fall and Sagittarius in winter. The ecliptic he placed in his heart and the circle of animals guiding him along the wheel he imbued with mythical power. As awareness moves at dawn, the zodiac sprang forth.
The earth turned many times around the beacon of knowledge and still he watched. The seasons cycled through exuberance into quiescence and back again. The sun seemed to journey, first north, then south, at each extreme standing momentarily before turning within the boundary of the tropics. The halfway point, as ecliptic's path crossed the equator's marking spring, vernal equinox. This mark he made upon the wheel.
Before him, long ago, others too had noted this special time. Then the stars of Aries had lain beyond sunrise at the vernal equinox, Cancer and Capricorn beyond sunrise at solstice marked the turning of the sun. For over two millennia the wheel was in this relation. Maps, boundaries, beliefs, were drawn, laid and propped upon these observations.
Time kaleidoscopically continued turning the cosmos, bringing Pisces westward and spring a little earlier each year in star time. This sidereal motion towards the new star age Aquarius, assuring the changing face of relationship.
As with belief, his map showed only a past exploration. With lightness moving his heart beyond the ecliptic and out into the greater universe, he soared above all paths. Knowing how to continue, he looked once at the still sky, then in response to the starlight that he is he held his map aloft and set it aflame.
© Erik Stein