The Night Sky

Greetings!

My son is working on the astronomy merit badge for Scouts right now — which means that I am also working on the astronomy merit badge, an experience that probably sounds familiar to many parents.

Mostly, I love this aspect of being a dad — your child’s interests become an opportunity to be closer to each other and to learn something new. We went to a fantastic observatory together, for instance. Right now, he is drawing pictures of how the moon changes from one night to the next. He complains about this — but he doesn’t complain as well. We stand for a few minutes outside, eyes up, the “spring peepers” (which are tiny but very loud chorus frogs) in a nearby pond singing. 

But right now, when I go out with my son and look upwards, I also see a lot of darkness. Maybe seeing the absence of light is something associated with the quiet pause of feeling news crowd in through my silence. I’ve mostly stopped talking about about current events with him. We can find other things to discuss, and he doesn’t need to share my burdens. Not right now — we can talk about the moon. We have plenty to talk about.

A few weeks ago, I was lagging behind a group of colleagues after a lovely dinner in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We were walking back to our bus, our last meal as a group after a very productive week of working together on the Water Resilience Tracker. The week had been really useful and deeply gratifying. But we could also feel the intensifying lurch of living when history is accelerating in unkind ways.

I rounded a corner, waiting a moment for a car to pass, when a man standing beside his tuk-tuk said, “Where are you from?” The United States, I said. “How is California,” he asked?

I paused and looked at him intently. I put my hand on his arm and said, “Not great. Thank you for asking. Still burning.”

This is a time with widespread and abrupt cruelty. Our temptation is to hide or to lash out, but this can also be a time of kindness and concern. Standing with a stranger, twelve time zones away from home, I heard a man express his concern about my country — about his fellow humans. 

Last week I was in Mexico, and a friend and colleague had asked me to talk with his colleagues about the importance of cooperation across borders. What are the trends? Where are we headed? What does our work mean today? 

The trends do not look good. Many sources of support and aid are retreating or even shifting from humanitarian and ecological funding to buying tanks and drones. Good work and good people are stranded, disavowed, disrupted. It is hard not to look at the tilting landscape and see that suffering and loss are growing rapidly. I had numbers, hard numbers, and I used them in the meeting, but the image was clear: the night sky looks grimly dark.

But there is also a brightness that we cannot deny as well. The past week has seen a conjunction of planets that shines very brightly here in Oregon’s night, even in the dusk. And the stars — billions of years old, trillions of kilometers away — unchanged and persistent. Less showy than the planets, yes, but strong and steady.

In my peroration, I said, part of our job now must be to see those stars in the night and to bind them and draw constellations to guide us. We need them to help us see new patterns emerging. With kindness, we can help other people see these points too. Our compasses are shifting. We need to look beyond the darkness.

In kindness,

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA