Away From it All

The Milky Way galaxy is whirling rapidly, spinning our sun and all its other stars at around 100 million km per hour.....

And yet, the night I lie out on the airstrip at Buck Creek, just a few miles from the entrance to Mt. Rainier, to watch the stars in my sleeping bag next to my closest friends; it felt as though the universe was as still as could be.

After writing my last post, I was in dire need of some "friend time", and, as usual, the time we spent together cured the doldrums that had crept up on me during the course of the day. Emily and Aaron are like my "Happiness Project Resurrectors" and they don't even realize it half the time. As I sat at my computer, gloomily writing my blog entry, they arrived with bean dip and my favorite, Bud Lite Lime; I provided the Costco jug of Pub Mix and the tortilla chips. We grabbed some sleeping bags, pillows and jackets and headed for the hills. Literally.

It was almost 9 pm, the sky was clear and the air was fresh and cool. Darkness was upon us as we entered the campground and it was only then that we realized we had forgotten the flash lights.  So, when we found the air strip that separated one side of the campground from the other, we used Emily's Bug "Bella's" headlights until we got semi-situated. Then in the pitch black we settled in and gazed up at the starlit sky.

What we saw took our breath away; a ceiling of stars that twinkled and raced across the night sky. The Big Dipper, which usually appears nearly solo in the city sky, was surrounded by thousands of stars. It was cold but it didn't matter. My mind cleared and the awesome feeling of insignificance filled my soul. Wonder at the almighty power of God filled my soul, as well. I also marveled over the fact that God would send His Son to die for us tiny insignificant beings. My heart was filled with contentment.

I knew then, that I could face any task ahead of me. In fact, I looked forward to facing my next challenge. That is the power of nature...God's nature.

As I looked into the galaxy, I was filled with a desire to know more. I wanted to know what star I was looking at, how far away it was, how old it was and much more. So today I took to the world-wide web to give me some answers. This is what I learned:

• The pull of gravity is calculated between heavenly bodies by multiplying their masses together, and then dividing the total by the square of the distance between them. HUH?! OK, I had to ditch that site.
• There may be a huge black hole in the very middle of  most of the galaxies. Now, that's a little more interesting.
• If you fell into a black hole, you would stretch like spaghetti. Yikes! Now, THAT is good information. Hope that never happens.
• A day in Mercury lasts approximately as long as 59 days on earth. Wow. And I thought today was a long day.

What I really found out is there is a lot of "There may be's" and "it's possibles"....I mean, how do they know that we would stretch like spaghetti? Has that ever happened to anyone? What it seems to boil down to is that the very smart people who know a lot of stuff about the universe don't really know any more than the child, who, looking up in the night sky, says, "God made those."

Awesome pic....not captured by me unfortunately.

Happy days to all,

Gina.