A few weeks back, I saw a shooting star. Not your run of the mill, garden variety shooting star, but a real shooting star. A shooting star with a fiery tail stretching out behind it, and blue-green flames rolling and churning around its bright, white core.
I have always loved how clear the night sky becomes in autumn, when the summer haze lifts, and the stars and moon seem so clear you could touch them. This was just such a chilly clear night in Southern Michigan.
I was admiring the spectacular display of stars when I saw, what I first took to be, an airplane. I only noted it because it seemed to be moving so quickly across the sky. Within a second or two it grew and I could see its flaming tail, spitting off streamers of gold and green. I assumed someone must be setting off fireworks left over from the fourth of July. But it kept getting bigger and brighter as it moved over the night sky. It was halfway through its trip overhead before I recognized it for what it was.
By then, the meteor itself was visible as a bright white core. I could clearly see the flames whipping around it, and stretching out in a twisting tail behind. Every color of the rainbow was on display in that fire.
The meteor made a majestic arc across the star-scape, from right to left. Just before it reached the far horizon, it went out. It didn’t peter out. It didn’t die. It simply went out.
I felt an almost painful hope that the meteor had not burned out, but had bounced out of the atmosphere, and back into space. I had shared an intimate moment with this beautiful traveler from the void, and it shouldn’t be dead. I wanted so badly to believe that it had escaped its encounter with the Earth, and is now hurtling through the void, carrying our shared experience to Pluto and the Oort cloud beyond.
It is such a beautiful idea that something out there, where I could never reach, has shared something with me, and carries that part of myself with it.
Perhaps it did burn out, and the dilation of perspective only made it seem to escape the atmosphere. But it really doesn’t matter. Every time I look up at the night sky now, I imagine that late meteor, turned asteroid, racing through space on its rebellious orbit. I wonder what happened to it as it rounded the Sun. I say a silent prayer to Newton that Jupiter’s gravity doesn’t gobble it up on its way to visit the comets in their winter home.
For a cold logical atheist like myself, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience. For the first time in my life, I look at the heavens, and I feel a personal bond with something up there, unseeable, and unknowable.
The experience has reminded me that we do not need fantasy to appreciate the fantastic. There is so much in our universe to inspire wonder and awe. Turning to myth only cheapens the real miracles of reality.
