I am very blessed to live in a place where the nighttime sky is magnificent.  There is very little ambient light and so the stars are absolutely stunning.  There are layers upon layers of stars.  There are gloriously bright stars piercing with their utter clarity.  And there are hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands, of other stars peaking through and scattered throughout the dark domain.  The faint white cloud of our own Milky Way galaxy is visible in a great arch, inspiring great wonder in this eastern girl who for almost fifty years never saw such an amazing thing.

I was feeling sorry for all the city and suburban folks who don’t get the pleasure of gazing upon such a magical, mystical scene.  And I was feeling sorry for the sky.  The cosmos is magnificent and amazing whether we have the ability to see it or not.  It isn’t the cosmos’ fault that we have lit our world so well with artificial light that the light of the stars and the galaxies is not visible.

When I mentioned this to a friend last night, the metaphor became immediately obvious to me.  What if we shine magnificently as the divine sparks in human form that we are, but the pollution cast by others sometimes masks or overshadows that magnificence?  Does that mean we are any less special?  No.  It simply means that our light is not always seen or appreciated.  Should we give up then and dim our light?  No!  No, no, no, no.  The world would be a poorer place if we all dimmed our light.  Rather let us shine as brightly as we can.

Marianne Williamson writes about this brilliantly in the famous quotation below (sometimes mistakenly attributed to the equally brilliant Nelson Mandela.)

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

It is my pleasure to brightly shine in this vast sky of humanity with you.  May we and the angels around us shine brightly, lighting up the darkness and creating a tapestry of unspeakable beauty.

Blessed be, fellow star beings.