God's in his heavens: contemplating the stars and our Earth's place in the cosmos can comfort us and inspire us to a renewed commitment in our lives. (essays/opinion).

Last night I dreamed I was lying outdoors in an open clearing beside a forest. The land, the earth beneath me, was rocking slowly back and forth. I watched the moon directly above me sway behind a few leafless trees and then out into the open sky, a mottled ivory-grey sky with thin and scattered clouds, then back again behind the trees.

I said to myself in my dream, "I bet nobody has ever seen the moon move like that before." The Earth was a cradle, and I was being rocked slowly and steadily, aware, serene, and happy.

I don't know where dreams come from, maybe from many places. But I do know I'd been thinking recently about how the Earth moves through space. It seems now that not only is the Earth rotating on its axis and revolving around our star, the sun, and moving with the solar system around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, but it is also moving up and down, like a horse on a carousel, very, very slowly over millions of years.

The theory is that in this motion the Earth occasionally moves through clouds of interstellar dust cooling its surface, and that this is the cause of our periodic ice ages.

I'd been trying to envision all of these motions and my participation in them, picturing the images we have of Earth from space, trying to grasp the very strangeness of it all. This vision was oddly comforting to me.

Why comforting? In dark times when human affairs seem impossibly tangled and no certain course of action is evident, in dangerous times filled with hatred, deceit, ill will, and increased fears for ourselves and our families, it is often comforting to me to move into the realm of the stars, out into that old, old awe-inspiring realm of great expanse and mystery from which the material of our being has come, to picture our Earth within the roiling energy of the universe and its innumerable events of light.

In 1990, a photograph of the Earth was taken by the spacecraft Voyager I as it traveled beyond the orbit of Neptune, the eighth planet from the sun. In this photograph the Earth appears as a tiny white pearl barely visible from that distance, a pearl the size of the last pearl on a string of pearls, a tiny orb suspended among a host of stars. Carl Sagan called it a pale blue dot.

Everything we value and all of human history is contained on that speck. Glaciers, orchids, apricots, ferns, and limestone bluffs; Caesar, Michelangelo, Einstein, the shudder of stampeding horses or wildebeests, the thunder and dust of rolling tanks, dinosaur bones, and fossilized forests; grandmothers, grandfathers, the oleander bush ill the backyard, the dog asleep beneath it, wild oceans, and polar icebergs; everything we touch, everything we hear and taste, all that we trust, all that we cherish is present on that tiny dot, almost invisible, almost lost, a grain floating in a sea deeper, wider, and darker than we can conceive.

From this perspective, human cruelty to one another, bombs and guns, nuclear weapons, the passion for vengeance or power, seem pathetically childish, absurd, insane. We are alone on a tiny spot of life in the midst of the vast unknown, the black blindness of space and time, and yet we have been engaged almost continuously in killing one another since the beginning of recorded history.

Someone watching us at bloody war with each other on that tiny speck in the universe--the Earth cratered by our weapons--would surely shake his head in astonishment. By all reason and known facts, we should be clinging to one another, helping, consoling one another, celebrating together the life and the moment we are given.

Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother wrote, "I have ... a terrible need ... dare I say the word? ... of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars." We have his remarkable painting The Starry Night as a result.

Contemplation of the stars has been a steady presence in most human cultures and has given rise to religious thoughts, to questions about human existence and our first origins, to reaffirmation of a presence beyond ourselves and yet within ourselves. The poem Star-Gazing by Claudius Ptolemaeus, a Greek-Egyptian living in the second century, is evidence of this human tendency.

   That I am mortal I know and do confess
   My span of day:
   but when I gaze upon
   The thousandfold circling gyre of the stars,
   No longer do I walk on earth
   but rise
   The peer of God himself to take my fill
   At the ambrosial banquet of the Undying.

Moments of realization concerning our place in the universe can come upon us unexpectedly. Isak Dinesen describes the hero of her tale "The Monkey" experiencing such a moment as he walks down a corridor of windows in a chateau one night: "He looked out of one of the windows as he passed it. The moon stood high in the heavens, clear and cold, but the trees of the park and the lawns lay in a silvery mist. There outside was the whole noble blue universe, full of things, in which the Earth swam onward amongst thousands of stars, some near and others far away. O world, he thought, O rich world."

Humans are moved by the vision of our Earth floating in the immensity of the heavens, surrounded by stars. 'Whether we are full of wonder or fear, whether we feel diminished or liberated, elated, blessed, or humbled, we see ourselves and our Earth anew when we give ourselves to that Vision.

Unfortunately those of us living in this country today rarely see the night sky undimmed by city lights. Thus we are without an extremely important source of inspiration and spiritual reflection that was available to our ancestors.

Recently a woman:living in Los Angeles with her family told me that she asked her young daughter how many stars she thought there were. Her daughter answered, "Three."

For most of us, it takes some planning and probably a little traveling to reach a place where the night sky can spread above us clear and unobscured from horizon to horizon.

I was shocked the last time I had an occasion to witness such a sky. It was over rural Wyoming. I'd forgotten how black the night can be, a black that never stops, and yet how totally filled with stars. Lying on the ground and looking up, I thought I was immersed in the starry body of God. I was part of the body of God. I knew I was being touched everywhere by ancient light that had traveled immense distances to reach me, to enter my eyes and become recognized. In my poem Why Lost Divinity Remains Lost I wrote about ...

   the stars, seeded by an uneven hand,
   so profuse, so demanding, so clearly

   insistent in their silence.

But we are also fortunate in our time, because we have stories told by our astronomers that increase our amazement of the heavens, stories our ancestors never had an opportunity to hear.

Last November my husband and I rose in the middle of the night to witness the Leonid meteor shower. I thought we might be the only ones to leave warm beds on a cold night to watch a few "falling stars." When we arrived at a nearby park, however, I was surprised to see cars lining the roads, and many people, some with coats thrown over their pajamas, standing, watching the skies.

All of us, especially the raucous children, thoroughly enjoyed this spectacle, unlike people of the 19th century who woke to similar meteor showers in panic and fear, believing the stars were falling and the end of the world was at hand. We knew those bright showers of "falling stars" were the result of the Earth passing through the trail of dust particles left behind by the comet Tempel-Tuttle, the dust particles burning as they entered the Earth's atmosphere.

The sight was exhilarating, because I knew, I could feel, I was riding on the Earth, our beautiful racing, spinning Earth speeding among all the other moving elements of the universe. I felt again the magic of that vision of our Earth traveling through a realm magnificent in its scope.

"Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold the height of the stars, how high they are!" So Job exclaims the grandeur and wonder of the stars (Job 22:12). The vision of the starry heavens has the power to remind us of who we are, of where we are. By imagining our place in the universe of space and time and holding tight to that image, we might redefine the ultimate nature of the human state, invigorate that definition, proclaim our nature, and dedicate our unique talents once again to praise and to life.

PATTIANN ROGERS is a poet who lives in Colorado. Her most recent book is Song of the World Becoming: Poems, New and Collected, 1981-2001 (Milkweed Editions, 2001).