The solidarity of night provides one with a sense of great knowing. In the perpetual darkness that surrounds, one cannot help but feel a sense of absolute defenselessness and acute soul-embracing vulnerability. Pretenses are stripped away and the unrefined thoughts and imaginings of one’s inner self are laid bare beneath the commanding glory of the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once penned these immortal words, ‘If a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.’

As I run beneath a southern sky, these shining emissaries of light cause my gaze to be lifted ever upward. In their immeasurable greatness they bestow an unarticulated clarity to life and impale any contemplation that does not have its grounding in truth, and in the vast limitless of their horizons they command my thoughts to ever rise above in searing splendor and challenge the ceilings of my self-perpetuated limitations.