A Little Girl With Her Head in the Stars

Star Gazing

When I was a little girl, I would lie in the cold, damp grass and stare into space. Each star, so massive in reality, was just a pinpoint of light to me. I made a wish each time I saw a falling star. I’d keep it in my heart, or else it wouldn’t come true.

As I grew, I learned that Pluto was no longer a planet. But, unlike the rest of the world, I wasn’t offended. Instead, I was interested: Why not?

Pluto hasn’t managed to clear its “neighboring region of other objects?” Basically, Pluto doesn’t have enough gravitational pull to either pull in the objects as satellites or spin them further into space.

When researching the topic, I found out that we were planning to send a probe past Pluto and out into deep space. This was groundbreaking work, and the farthest anything man-made would ever travel through the solar system.

That’s when I discovered how unfathomably huge our solar system actually is: 186 million to 372 million miles wide! As I learned, I started to think about just how small that makes me. I’m a speck on a great cosmic playing field that I haven’t even begun to understand the vastness of. I’d never felt so insignificant and so full of awe.

A Thoughtful Moment With Cute Boy

We were hiking at night through the sandy hoodoos of a State Park in Nevada. The sky was vibrant that night, and the Milky Way shone. We made our way slowly, watching out for each other. The trail was fragile and prone to collapse.

At the top, we sat in the gazebo and watched the sky. He looked at me, eyes gleaming, with a little smile playing on his lips, and says, “look at the stars! There must be thousands of them in just our galaxy!”

I laughed. “There are millions of stars in our galaxy!”

We argued, but not for long because we were both wrong. There are billions of stars in the Milky Way. Astoundingly, according to a 2016 study, there may be two trillion galaxies in the universe, each one containing millions or billions of stars, many potentially the center of their own solar systems.

Each one is possibly home to life, not necessarily similar to us. In fact, many of them may have moons capable of sustaining life, like astronomers theorize could be the case on Europa, an icy moon belonging to Jupiter.

There are almost 8 billion people on the planet, hundreds of billions less than stars in the galaxy. It was then I realized human life might not be unique. We could be one of many intelligent civilizations in the universe, and I am one of the billions like me.

Where is My Place in the Universe?

There’s no good answer to this question, is there? I’ve never been particularly religious; if I was, I still don’t know that I could find the answer. My world is so small in an endless cosmos. How could I possibly mean anything in an expansive sea of incredible things?

My mind wanders to nebulae, the hot and dusty nurseries where stars are born, or to the edges of black holes where I’d be spaghettified for daring to wander too closely. There’s nothing but possibility in the realm of space.

Bringing myself back down to Earth, with the ground beneath me and an arm of the galaxy above me, I concentrate on what’s in front of me: mountains, rivers, trees, and cities. I’m held tightly by gravity to a rocky globe that simultaneously keeps me safe and presents me with constant danger.

I don’t need to mean anything to the universe. I need to find meaning in myself and my planet. In my work and writing, I search for a place, a meaning, and a home where I am. It may not matter to the cosmos, but it matters to me. Life is full of possibilities.

Originally Published on Medium.com.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like The Mountain is Calling Me Today!