Night Musings: Finding Peace in the Darkness

Dear readers,

There is something so peaceful about the night air. It’s like the breezes from space come to scrub down the heat scars and burn marks from the day, especially in the tropics.

You look up at the night sky, even better in locations where light pollution enables you to see the great theatre of the universe, to get a tiny glimpse of the 200 sextillion stars, which seem hung in space by invisible threads to a black ceiling. Yet the space has no ceiling. That’s the beauty of it. The universe has no end. Infinity. It’s too absurd and big to consider, just the mysteries of it. I’m on a high. Not on intoxicants. Just curiosity and amazement.

It’s exciting taking it all in, the shooting stars, planets, moons, UFOs (maybe). The night sky helps me feel insignificant, shrinks my ego when I’m feeling too full of myself, but also crushes the day’s frustrations and disappointments and comments from idiots and imbeciles. It’s my balance. It’s my antidepressant and anxiety valve release. It’s a pro of suffering from insomnia. Despite the other 8 billion people on Planet Earth, the night feels mine: all mine.

All the activities one can do at night, for both introverts and extroverts. Sleep and/or good sex come to mind, if you can get it. Intimate midnight talks with loved ones and friends, or rows with soon-to-be ex-partners and people you no longer respect. Parties or reading a book or watching a movie, or taking a walk in the wee hours. Mothers care for their screaming babies. Murderers and thieves fulfill their deeds, while nurses and doctors go about theirs. Sex workers do their thing. Lonely men and women do theirs. Other workers return home alone in an empty car, listening to late-night radio DJs spin their lonely tunes. You have the irresponsible students and desperate office workers, leaving assignments to the last minute and pulling all-nighters with support from caffeine or other substances. Witches make their brews. Priests give their Midnight Mass. Ghosts and spirits fuck with our minds. UFOs curb crawl anonymously around the solar system.

Then there are those who invest in the night, the astronomists and astrologists; the former studying the science of space, the latter studying what’s going to happen in our lives in the next day, week, month, year. Moons and planets going retrograde which means our emotions are going to explode and/or we’ll meet our soulmate tomorrow morning over coffee. Either way, I know I’ll be treated with extreme contempt for being a Scorpio the next day. After all, Scorps will Scorp.

Someone was talking to me about astrology the other night. She thought I thought she was mad. I didn’t. I didn’t understand exactly what she was saying. My confused face and ‘I think you’re crazy as fuck’ face seem to look similar. I keep an open mind to all ideas. The night helps me do that. I wish I knew more about the energies of the universe, to be at one with it, to feel connected and solitary simultaneously and to understand the narrative happening above my head in the theatre known as night. In the meantime, I will take photos of the moon and publish my musings on this very page when, really, I should be sleeping.

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