Twice a day and both times in the dark, once at night before bed and again in the morning just after waking up, I walk out back to the 6th tee box on the golf course where we live and I admire the heavens in all their created glory. The temperature dropped to 30 degrees overnight, making the well-trimmed ryegrass feel like walking on a frozen crewcut.

At night I have my ritual of looking in particular for the constellation Orion and the surrounding stars and also for “nearby” Mars. (So odd that I would refer to these celestial bodies as if they sat on the circumference of a spherical boundary rather than existing on billions of concentric hyperbolic planes that constitute no barrier to travel.) Last night I found Betelgeuse and then, down and to the West, Sirius.

This morning I found the Big Dipper, and I remembered that it’s handle pointed toward some significant body. And indeed it did, to the quite bright Arcturus, which I looked up on Stellarium. That iPhone app also showed me that a Starlink satellite was passing overhead. Fricking cool.

This post might be boring to some, and now it constitutes a meta statement, which is also boring, even to me, but the experience itself is ineffable.

Smell the roses overhead.