the observatory: observations from a writer's mind

"The observatory."  A play on words. Astronomers turn their telescopes towards the skies to observe what they can in the stars; searching, seeking, hoping to discern the inscrutable. They don't fully understand the universe, it's patterns, and still they delve for answers.We're all like that, a little bit. We want to make sense of these lives that we're living, and we look for answers in the things within reach. Too often, I find my gaze on my feet, observing nothing but my own patch of dirt. Turn up, O eyes, to the sun and all beyond it. What I seek cannot be found within myself. When was the last time you paused to observe the stars?

"There's a certain slant of light...." It's the opening line of an Emily Dickinson poem of the same name. On winter afternoons, she sees the sunlight slanting and it awakens something inside her, a dormant longing for meaning; "Heavenly hurt it gives us/We can find no scar/but internal difference/Where the meanings are." Light does that, you see. On grey days like this when the opaque sky reflects my heart and the sunlight seeps through a veil of clouds to fill the stark, vivid world...something moves in response, something deep inside of me. Is it an existentialist desire for something more? An echo of all the dreams trying to wake up inside of me? It gives me a hollow, ghostly grief...but it also brings me hope. I'm a writer. No matter if no one reads me, if no one hears me: still, I will write. What does the light tell you?