Fire in the sky

Time somehow slows down when you are caught up in the beauty that surrounds us. We sat in the spa last night to watch nature’s firework show. As the earth passed through a belt of space debris, we got to witness the annual Perseid meteor shower. It is so named for the constellation from which these meteors seem to originate in the northern sky. The brightness of the moon did washout some of the more dim meteors; but there were some spectacular displays of atmospheric friction.

I silently wondered why we are so impressed by shooting stars. It might be their unanticipated fleeting glory. Within the serene constancy of the sky, we are suddenly surprised. Completely by chance we happened to be gazing in the right direction when a light flicked on for only a second. This excites us.

This reminded me of what it is like to fall and be in love. The initial romance of falling in love is like the shooting star: unexpected, fleeting, full of fire and passion, impetuous. The excitement is palpable. Once married, love is more constant and necessarily so. This consistent love is more like the stars: unchanging, predictable, eternal. Yet, not gets excited upon seeing Betelgeuse in Orion's belt and exclaims, "Look, honey, Betelgeuse is in the same place that it has been for the last 4 billion years!!!"

Sometimes you hear a woman complain that the romance is gone. This sentiment inevitably develops after the years of shared responsibility create a predictable routine as we orbit around each other. And yet, what wife wants to wonder every morning if her husband is going to go to work that day? Is the husband surprised again when he gets home to find that his wife, this week, has flown to Madagascar to get vanilla directly from its source? Marriage cannot survive without a mutual trust of consistency and predictability.

That being said, in the heavens of our love, there must exist the possibility of the occasional random flame amidst our unchanging stars. I often don’t buy Barbie flowers on the expected holidays. Rather, I might show up with the symbolically impractical bouquet of murdered flowers because April 3rd fell on a Thursday this year.

Ultimately, love must contain the stars and the meteors. We will always need both the North Star to guide and the fanciful flame to excite us.

Kevin