Twinkle, twinkle little star

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Recently, I ventured out on a long sandy beach and walked several kilometres along the icy waters of Lake Erie. I was happy that it was warm enough to be able to leave my footprints in the sand rather than the snow.

This past winter was a cold one for southern Ontario and it was the first time in many years that most of the Great Lakes froze completely over. Even now, at the end of April, I could still see ice flows moving by.

As it got dark so I sat down on the sand to stare up at the sky. I hate to admit it but it had been a while since I had done any stargazing. I think most of us tend to forget that we live on a spinning planet that is hurtling through space as it revolves around the sun. It makes me feel good to stare up at the stars.

The Cree of the James Bay coast have always been aware of the stars. These bright lights in the sky were our guides for traveling on the land or on the water.

My Elders and ancestors spent most of their time on the land harvesting food for survival and gathering firewood. We didn’t see things under artificial light the way we do these days. People tend to get stuck in their lives and spend most of the time in their homes watching TV or on the Internet, driving in their cars to and from work or school and rarely connecting to Mother Nature.

We tend to think that the universe revolves around us but of course that’s a joke. As I sat on the darkening beach, I was reminded that there are more stars in our known universe than all of the grains of sand on all of the beaches on our planet. This fact sure reminds me of just how insignificant we human beings are in the grand scheme of things.

I was also reminded that we humans have only recently begun to understand our place in the universe. Even though ancient astronomers, philosophers and scientists considered the natural order of things, many times religious beliefs and political minds of the day censored new knowledge.

The most famous example is Galileo, who observed in the early 1600s that our planet and the other planets revolved around a stationary sun. This contradicted the conventional wisdom of the time that earth was the centre of the universe. Galileo was convicted by the Roman inquisition of heresy and put under house arrest for the rest of his life. Many decades later, after research by other astronomers, the Catholic Church relented on the censorship of Galileo’s work.

Indigenous people have always understood their relationship to the natural world. They were in awe of the stars, the sun, the moon, the trees, the animals, waterways and mountains. Their belief systems involved all of these elements. Today we have a clearer understanding of how things work but our connection to all things natural seems to be out of sync.

There is a resurgence of interest in stargazing but that is mostly due to the fact that we are hearing more about asteroids and meteors crashing into our atmosphere. Part of this is due to our media and electronic surveillance providing us with more awareness of these phenomena. We have not entered into any new phase of meteor activity; it is just that we have become more aware of how vulnerable we are in our universe.

Every year, astronomers are finding more potential planets that could sustain life. From my vantage point, sitting on top of billions of grains of sand and staring into what seems to be an infinite space of stars and galaxies, the importance of man is fleeting. I like to believe that there is another being out there on one of those planets looking back and wondering the same thing.

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