Venture Into the Night

“If on a startlit night,

With the moon brilliantly shimmering,

 We stay inside and do not venture out,

The evening universe remains a part of life we shall not know..."*

My daughter wanted the tent in the yard for her birthday.

It became the fort-of-the-week.

I had just been exchanging "no-fun-mom" woes with a few friends, and decided I'd try to be "fun".

It turned into a weekend-long star-gazing campout. With no rain in sight, the mesh top was the perfect observatory for sleeping bag dwellers.

It was pretty glorious.

The Evening Universe became just a little more familiar to us.

And I saw that when I show interest in something, it can be a little contagious [sometimes]. It made me think of the scholé, or leisurely learning I am reading of, and absorbing, and beginning to dive into.

Not a hurried, check-off-the-activity-or-paper learning, but a "love what is lovely" learning, a learning that pours into life- not just "school".  A learning that isn't lazy, but leisurely, in that, it takes TIME. Sweet time. Time looking at sky charts and trying to match it to the REAL sky, time looking at the daytime sky, time thinking and reading about how the sky is God's great big clock and calendar for us.

Gen. 1:14: And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years...

What?! So cool.

So, we aren't very good at finding many constellations [yet], but were inspired by Fred of Life of Fred fame, to find collinear stars, and triangles and such...

And we have been, little by little, watching the moon's cycles, following the big dipper's trail around the moon through the night, finding Cassiopeia and her "W", and we're pretty good at locating Venus and Jupiter.

 I try using the recently discovered [by me] 5 Common Topics of Invention [here's a cute bookmark with them on it] and the Topic Wheel to lead us through all the Goodness we can in our star-gazing ventures...

My girls are 10, 8 and 6, so I don't expect to get too far in either- but its a start- and helps us form connections to all of God's World, and see how it's all intertwined.

Imperfectly and feebly, I went- but we ventured out anyway. You can too!

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.   

- William Shakespeare ( Merchant of Venice)

* poem excerpt by Marni P. Harmony