Ocean and Sky

Sufficient to the day are the stressors thereof, like usual. But Venus has been unusually bright lately, which is something to be grateful for. I'll come out of a township government meeting, my head buzzing with the various workaday matters discussed there, and look up, and there it will be, blazing away like a lantern in the humid night sky. It takes you out of yourself for a moment, if you let it, and that's rather nice.

Years ago I spent a week at Cape Cod, just wandering around the various towns there, and noticed something: People would get lunch from a takeout place and then pull up facing the ocean. You'd see some working guy in a the cab of a pickup truck, taking a bite from his turkey hoagie with one hand, taking a pull from his bottle of Sprite with the other, the whole time looking out over the ocean with a faraway gaze, for all the world like a Zen monk deep in meditation.

I live a hundred miles from the ocean, so it's not available for lunchtime contemplation. But I live directly beneath the night sky, and it's always handy. Last night I was listening to some people play jazz in a coffee shop and wondering when I'd feel confident enough in my own piano-playing abilities to sit in with them. I was thinking about that driving home, that and everything else, all the things going on, and then I made a right turn and saw the crescent moon with Venus above it.

I won't say all the stressful things suddenly melted away and didn't matter, But it was like the ocean was for that guy in the pickup—it shifts your perspective just a bit, it soothes and refreshes. There's something in us that wants to look out over the ocean, just stand there and look, and something in us that can't help gazing at those lights in the sky, floating over us, so lovely, so impossibly far away. It's one of those deep-down things that just about everyone responds to in some fashion.

So it was hardly surprising that when I got home and got out of the car, I saw that my neighbors were sitting on their back porch, looking out to the west. I said hello and then turned and looked with them, and we all were quiet for a moment, watching Venus, shining away over the treetops.