a place under the stars

nasa.llori.orionnebula
“LL Ori & The Orion Nebula” by NASA, ESA & The Hubble Heritage Team

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces, is “Look under your foot.” You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place an hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.
~ John Burroughs
(Farm Journal, September 1908)

16 thoughts on “a place under the stars”

    1. Curiosity is so intense in little children, and it never disappears for generation after generation of grown-up explorers. 🙂

  1. I have this quote taped to the lid of my laptop:

    “Within walking distance of any spot on Earth, there is probably more than enough mystery, to investigate in a lifetime.”

    Alix Kates Shulman (Drinking the rain)

    1. You’re welcome, Laurie! What a mysterious universe we find ourselves in – it’s beyond mind-boggling.

  2. I love the comment (and the source). It’s fun to know that I’m not the only person who enjoys browsing through hundred-year-old magazines. 🙂

    1. Isn’t it amazing what we can find online these days, Sheryl? 🙂 Some of the articles and advertisements seem so quaint now, and others full of timeless wisdom.

  3. What a gem, Barbara, both the quote and the image. Thanks for sharing. Recently my daughter and I looked in awe at similar images she has been collecting on her computer. I can’t help ‘seeing’ images in them. In this one I imagine to see an angel.

    1. Thank you, Hanneke. The glimpses of the universe that the Hubble Space Telescope brings to us little humans here on our little blue spaceship earth are awe-inspiring indeed. It must be fun looking at pictures of deep space with your daughter – we all have stardust in our bones!

  4. “You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.” This quote is over 100 years old now. I wonder, are we any closer to our own power now, after all of those years? I do hope we have made a little progress.

    1. As individuals I think many of us have become more and more aware of the true source of our power. But parts of society in general still seem woefully fixated on fame, possessions and money and other illusions of power. There are many hopeful signs that this is changing…

  5. Fantastic photo Barbara! Synchronicity that you published this Barbara. Last weekend we stayed at a B and B where the owner has his own little Observatory in the backyard and he gave us an astronomy 101 lesson with time to look through the telescopes.
    Its unfathomable to think that our one milky way is one of millions or is it billions of galaxies? that the light we see from some of those stars shone out when dinosaurs walked the earth

    1. This is all mind-boggling, Rosie, how long it takes for light from the various stars to become visible to us. How lucky you got to spend some time looking through a telescope in an observatory!

      Occasionally they open the observatory at Connecticut College to the public for special astronomical events, but there always seems to be other commitments we have to care for at the time. Or, if we’re free the weather is bad and it gets canceled. Someday we’ll get there!

  6. Hi. I have a book called ‘The Hand of God’ from Andrews McMeel Publishing … it shows many of the amazing Hubble photos. I always think that if we could be out there, we could look back on our own history. Jane

    1. Wow! A whole book of amazing Hubble photos sounds like a wonderful coffee table book to have on hand! My son is into the tempting possibilities of interplanetary travel and other worlds of wonder that the understanding of quantum physics seems to be leading to. Recently I learned that we can tell what stars are made of by the colors of the light they emit……..

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