It was my dad who taught me to look up. I remember sitting on the front porch with him on a summer night in Solvang. I must have only been eight years old. An inventor, he'd built himself a telescope through which he showed me Jupiter and some of its moons, as well as the craters on our own moon. He told me the Pleiades were also called the Seven Sisters and pointed out to me the different constellations. Then, as he took a drag off of his Pall Mall cigarette, he said something that I've never forgotten, something I hear every time I'm outside looking up at the stars...When Joel was a toddler and we lived with my parents, my dad taught him to look up. In fact, Dad said, "Look up high!" to Joel so much, he thought planes were called "Up Highs". When a plane would pass overhead, Joel would point up to the sky and say, "Uh-pie!""We're just sitting on a speck of dust spinning in space."
I'm in the hammock as I write this, the Milky Way sparkling above me. A thousand crickets chirp, a Mozart piece is on my MP3 player and the connection I feel between heaven and earth and life is almost palpable. So much has happened in the fifteen years since Dad's passing. In that time I've buried half-a-dozen or more loved ones, but when I'm out under the stars I feel a profound connection with them and I remember that we are all just so much carbon—star dust—and that our imperative is to return to our source. I believe that the union we feel at that time is ecstatic in the truest sense of the word and that when my turn comes I'll send my surviving loved ones a simple thought:
"Do not mourn me for I am back where I belong. Soon, you will join me and we shall dance through the galaxies. Look up high!"
