Night-gazing

Wrap me in the silent night
the moonlit winds, the night-blue skies...

The night calms me down, soothes me. It doesn't require words or logic or analysis. Just gazing at the night sky while an occasional bat flits across the sky with a screech, and the wind makes the leaves crackle and rustle in the background. I wish there were more stars to be seen; I can just see a single one overhead...

The night lets me have a slight inkling of the vastness of the universe; the vaguest idea of the emptiness and the silence inherent in space. A mirror to the emptiness and loneliness we carry inside us at times. Sometimes that reflection terrifies you, at other times it calms you down...

My soul feels free leaving behind everything mundane, everything depressingly human; the anger, the disappointments, the never ending plans, the questions, the answers, the misunderstandings, the apologies, the helplessness, the sadness, the doubts, the memories... Like shedding away the outer skin of the soul, leaving everything somehow cleaner, purer. I'm free to let my mind wander where it will, unchecked; to let myself just feel without needing to categorise everything, to let things and feelings be unstructured... Yet so very aware of yourself, with the senses unfurled...

Maybe this is what meditation feels like.. I wonder if this is what people meant when they talked of their souls/hearts being stolen away by the night or the moon...

So impersonally beautiful, so grand, so terrible... So godlike?

And from outside of me, I look at myself, and I perceive my frailty, my flaws... At other times I feel blessed that I can see and feel and think and wonder.. The world is so very beautiful after all... And at yet other times I feel so utterly insignificant, like an insect scurrying about its life, so totally unaware of the utter meaninglessness of its life in the grand scheme of things...

It's not just the night though, there are so many avenues of mental escape if you really wish to do so.. These flights of spirit, the senses, and the mind are a need that I cannot deny for long. Neither would I wish to do so. For without them I feel that a part of what makes me uniquely me, begins to wither away.. And who would want to be somehow lesser than what they are...