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Hermione's Starlight Journeys: Walking Beneath the Living Constellations · Muggle Snuggle: A Boring Harry Potter Podcast to make you Sleep

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: A Muggle Snuggle Special, Hermione's Library, Episode 17. Good evening,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: my dear. You are here. I had hoped you would be,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: and now you are, and the evening is complete. Thing in.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: The library is warm. Not the fierce warmth of a
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: bonfire or a crowded room, but the slow, settled warmth
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: of a place that has been absorbing heat all day
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: from low fires and sunlit stone and the quiet industry
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: of people reading. The kind of warmth that does not
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: announce itself but finds you the moment you stop looking
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: for it, the way a cat finds the one warm
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: corner in a room full of cold ones. I have
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: been thinking about you all afternoon. Not in the frantic,
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: list-making way that the mind sometimes thinks about things it
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: must do, but in the softer way that the mind
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: thinks about things it wants to do, drifting toward you
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: the way a compass needle drifts toward north, not because
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: it must, but because that is its nature. I had
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: a feeling you would come tonight, Something in the quality
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: of the light told me. The way the afternoon sun
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: came through the high windows at an angle that meant
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: the earth had tilted just enough, just imperceptibly toward evening.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: The way the dust motes moved in those beams of
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: light slowly, slowly, as if even they understood that this
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: was not an hour for haste. the way the old
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: clock on the mantelpiece ticked a little differently, a little
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: more gently, as if it too had decided that the
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: second hand could afford to linger on each number just
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: a moment longer than usual. I set two cups of
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: tea before you arrived. Yours is still warm. I put
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: a small warming charm on it. Nothing elaborate, just enough
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: to keep the surface from forming that thin skin that
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: forms when tea is left too long. It is chamomile tonight,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: with a sprig of dried lavender and the smallest possible
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: amount of honey. Not because I know your preferences, though
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: I do, after all these evenings, but because the hour
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: demands it. Chamomile is a flower that understands what it
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: means to be tired. It grows low to the ground,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: close to the earth, heavy with its own small sweetness,
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: and it releases that sweetness only when it is steeped
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: in warm water and given time. There is a lesson
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: in that if you are the kind of person who
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: looks for lessons in flowers, and I suspect you are.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Outside the library windows, the sky is doing something extraordinary.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Not loud. Not dramatic. Not the kind of extraordinary that
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: makes you gasp or reach for a camera. The kind
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: of extraordinary that makes you go quiet. Which is a
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: much rarer and more valuable thing. The day has been
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: a September day mild with a breeze that smelled of
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: cut grass and distant rain. And now it is ending
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: in the way that September evenings end. All at once
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: and then very slowly. The sun has slipped below the
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: western hells, but its light lingers, spread across the underside
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: of the clouds in shades of apricot and rose and
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: a color that is not quite pink and not quite
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: gold but somewhere in the territory between, where colors go
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: when they are tired of being themselves and want to
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: be something else for a while. and above the clouds.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: You can see it now if you look past the
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: edges where the cloud dins to nothing. The sky. Not
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: the daytime sky. Not the bright blue blank canvas of afternoon,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: but the evening sky, which is something else entirely. It
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: is the color of a bruise that is healing, deep
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: violet at the edges, fading to a softer mauve where
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: the last light catches it, and in the very center,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: where the first stars are beginning to appear, a blue
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: so deep and so dark that it feels less like
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: a color and more like a depth as if the
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: sky were not a surface at all but an ocean,
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: and you are standing on the shore of it, looking out,
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: I want you to see those first stars. I want
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: you to see them the way I see them. Not
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: as points of light. Not as distant suns burning through
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: the void. Not as the scientific reality of hydrogen and
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: helium fusing in the hearts of objects so far away
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: that their light has been traveling since before you were born.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: I want you to see them the way a child
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: sees them, the way a very tired person sees them
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: when they are lying on their back in the grass
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: and the world has gone soft and slow and the
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: stars are not above them but around them. Part of
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: the same breath, the same stillness, the same quiet They
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: are old, those stars, they are older than the castle,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: they are older than the hills. They are older than
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: the idea of castles and hills, older than the thought
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: that first put a stone upon a stone and called
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: it a wall. And yet they are young too, in
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: the way that all things are young when they are
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: seen clearly, each one a new light. appearing for the
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: first time right now in this moment, as if it
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: has never appeared before and will never appear again, which,
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: in a sense, is true because the light you are
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: seeing left that star long ago and the light that
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: is leaving it now will not arrive here for years, centuries, millennia.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: And so what you are seeing is not the star
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: as it is, but the star as it was, a
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: memory of light, a ghost of brightness, reaching you across
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: an impossible distance to say, I was here. I was burning.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: I wanted you to see. Let us finish our tea.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Let the warmth of it settle into your hands, your wrists.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: The hollow of your throat where the warmth of liquid
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: travels best. And when you are ready, there is no hurry.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: There is never any hurry in this library. In this hour,
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: we will step outside. The evening is waiting for us.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: The stars are beginning to appear. And I have something
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: to show you that I have never shown anyone before.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: The door to the grounds is heavy oak, carved with
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: a pattern of interlocking leaves that no one has been
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: able to identify. Not the botanist, not the art historian,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: not even Professor Binns, who claims to have been alive
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: when the door was first hung and who admits, reluctantly,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: that the pattern was there before he arrived. The iron
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: handle is cool beneath your fingers. Not cold. Not the
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: biting cold of metal left in winter air, but the
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: cool of stone that has been in shadow all day.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: The cool of a deep well. The cool of the
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: inside of a church. Outside the Air I want you
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: to feel it. Stop for a moment at the threshold
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: and let the evening air find you. It will, if
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: you let it. It comes in from the south, over
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: the lake, carrying with it the particular smell of a
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: lake at night, which is not the same as the
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: smell of a lake in the day. In the day,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: a lake smells of water and wind and the green.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Vegetal life of its edges, the reeds and lilies and
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: the thins, sweet rot of fallen leaves. At night, a
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: lake smells of itself, of depth, of the dark water
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: where the bottom is unknown and the fish move in
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: slow circles. and the mud gives up its secrets only
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: in the form of tiny bubbles that rise to the
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: surface and burst without sound. The air tastes of that
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: depth and of the stone of the castle behind you
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: and of the grass under your feet, which is still
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: warm from the sun even though the sun is gone.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Because grass remembers warmth the way the old stones remember
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: every footstep that has ever fallen on them. We will
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: walk together, not quickly, not with purpose, not toward any
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: particular destination. We will walk the way a person walks
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: when they have nowhere to be and all the time
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: in the world to not be there. Along the path
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: that circles the lake, where the flagstones are worn smooth
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: by centuries of footsteps, and the moss grows in the
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: cracks between them like green thread sewn by patient hands.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Past the greenhouses, where the glass panes catch the last
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: of the light and hold it glowing faintly so that
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: each greenhouse looks like a paper lantern set down in
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: the garden. Beyond the greenhouses, to the open ground where
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: the grass grows longer and wilder and the Hogwarts groundskeeper
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: has not yet brought his scythe. The sky above is deepening.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: each moment another star, not all at once, not a
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: sudden cascade, but one at a time, each appearing in
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: its own place, at its own pace, as if the
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: sky were a room being lit by someone who is
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: very deliberate about which candles to light first and in
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: what order. The first stars are the ones near the horizon,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: the ones that are always the first because they have
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: the least sky to climb through, the least distance between
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: the place where they rise and the place where you
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: can see them. They come up, pale, almost colorless, washed
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: thin by the atmosphere. But as they climb, they sharpen,
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: they deepen. They become what they are. Not white. Not yellow.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: Not the color of any paint in any palette. But
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: a kind of light that has no name because it
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: is older than names, older than language, older than the
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: need to call things by what they are. And here
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: is a thought. If you want one, Every star you
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: see tonight, every single one, is a sun. A sun.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: With planets, perhaps. Worlds turning in their own darkness, warmed
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: by their own distant fires. And some of those worlds
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: might have someone standing on them, looking up at their
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: own sky, seeing our sun, which to them would be
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: a star, small and bright and far away, and wondering
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: if anyone on that distant point of light is looking back.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: And we are. We are looking back. Not at their
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: particular star, because we cannot know which one it is,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: but at the idea of it, the possibility which is
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: almost the same thing and almost not, and the difference
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: between those two things is the space in which all
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: wonder lives. We walk on. The path curves away from
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: the lake and into a gentle hollow where the grass
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: is soft and the air is still. A hedge of
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: topiary shapes, dragons, Unicorns, a particularly ambitious phoenix, stands dark
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: against the sky. And beyond the hedge, the sky is
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: fully dark now, fully committed to night, and the stars
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: have multiplied. There are so many that they overlap. They blur.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: They form patterns that your eye wants to connect. Lines
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: and shapes and stories that people have been telling themselves
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: about the sky since the first person looked up on
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: the first night and felt the first wonder. I want
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: to tell you about those patterns tonight. I want to
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: take you on a walk through the stars. Not a lecture,
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: not a lesson. I have had quite enough of those
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: in my years at this castle, and so have you.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: This is something different. This is a walk. A slow, meandering,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: unhurried walk through the night, with the stars as our
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: companions and the silence as our guide. Are you ready? Good.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Then let us begin where all good walks begin, at
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: the place where the path meets the ground. And the
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: ground meets the sky, and you cannot tell where one ends.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: And the other begins. There is a moment, on very
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: still nights, when the boundary between the sky and the
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: earth becomes uncertain. It happens at the far end of
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: the lake, where the water is deep and the far
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: shore is a thin line of darkness against the slightly
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: less dark sky. On nights like tonight, no wind, no cloud,
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: no moon to wash out the smaller stars. The water
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: holds the sky so perfectly that if you were to
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: stand at the water's edge and look straight down, you
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: would see stars beneath your feet, not reflections. Not exactly.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Something more. As if the lake were not reflecting the
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: sky but containing it, as if the sky were not
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: above the lake but also below it, and the water
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: were not a surface but a lens, a window, a
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: door into a second world that is identical to the
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: first but reversed, turned upside down, like a page seen
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: through glass. I have stood at this spot a hundred times.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: A thousand, perhaps. After my O. WL examinations after difficult evenings,
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: after days that were too long and too loud and
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: too full of other people's urgency. I come here, to
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: this exact place, where a flat stone sits at the
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: water's edge like a small stage and I sit on
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: it and I look down and the world inverts and
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: the weight of the day lifts and I remember that
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: I am very small and the world is very large
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: and the things that troubled me are smaller still. Particles, motes,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: the dust that drifts through the beams of light in
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: the library and settles on the spines of books and is,
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: in its own way, more permanent than I am. Tonight,
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: the lake is doing something I have not seen before.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: The stars in the water are not still. They are moving.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Not the slow, imperceptible drift of real stars, the kind
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: of movement that takes a lifetime to notice, but a gentle,
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: rhythmic pulse. As if each star in the water has
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: its own heartbeat, its own rhythm, its own small life
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: that it lives beneath the surface. And as I watch,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: as we both watch, one of those stars rises, It
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: lifts from the surface of the water like a soap bubble,
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: round and bright and impossibly delicate. And it floats upward,
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: trailing a thin thread of light behind it. And it
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: rises through the air until it reaches the height of
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: the hedge. And then it stops and it hangs there.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: And it glows and it waits. Another follows, and another,
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: and another. They rise from the water one by one,
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: each a different brightness, each a different size, each carrying
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: its own small weight of light upward through the dark
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: air as if the air were water and they were fish.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: Swimming toward the surface, they do not rush. They do
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: not tumble or spin or race each other. They rise
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: with the slow, patient grace of bubbles, of dandelion seeds,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: of the first breath of morning mist that lifts from
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: the lake on cold autumn days and drifts without hurry.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: toward the trees. And when enough of them have risen,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: I do not know how many, dozens, perhaps, scattered across
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the water's surface like seeds of light, they begin to move.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Not randomly. Not chaotically. But with purpose. With direction. as
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: if each one knows where it is going and is
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: in no particular hurry to get there. They drift toward
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: the shore. They drift across the grass. They drift past us,
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: between us, around us, close enough that you could reach
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: out and touch one, though I would not recommend it,
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: not because it would harm you. but because some things
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: are more beautiful when they are observed and not touched,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: when they are allowed to be what they are without
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: being changed by the act of holding them. One drifts
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: past my shoulder, close enough that I can feel the
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: warmth of it, a small, contained warmth, like the warmth
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: of a candle held at arm's length. It is the
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: color of the star that I saw when I was
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: very young. The one I told you about earlier. The
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: color of weak tea. The color of late afternoon. The
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: color of the moment between day and night. When the
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: world cannot decide what it wants to be and so
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: becomes something both and neither. It pauses. It seems to
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: look at me. and then it drifts on, joining the
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: slow procession of light that is making its way across
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: the castle grounds, over the grass, past the greenhouses, toward
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: the tower, the astronomy tower. Of course, Where else would
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: the stars go on a night like this, but to
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: the highest point of the castle, where the sky is
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: closest and the stone is oldest and the brass instruments
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: still hold, in their polished surfaces, the faint impression of
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: every constellation they have ever measured. Thing, let us follow them.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: Let us walk where the stars walk and see what
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: they see and feel what they feel, which is nothing
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: urgent and everything important, which is the particular piece of
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: being exactly where you are meant to be, doing exactly
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: what you are meant to do, which is nothing at
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: all except being present, except breathing, except walking slowly through
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: a night that has all the time in the world
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: and none of the need to use it. The first
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: constellation we meet is the one you would expect. The
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: one that always introduces itself first, the way certain people do.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: Striding into a room with their chest forward and their
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: shoulders back and their voice pitched at exactly the volume
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: that ensures everyone turns to look. Orion. The Hunter. He's
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: impossible to miss on a night like this. Standing tall
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: in the southern sky, his belt of three bright stars, Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka,
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: so perfectly aligned that they look artificial, as if someone
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: had taken a ruler to the sky and drawn a
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: line of light. But we are not looking at the
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: sky tonight. We are looking at what has come down
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: from the sky. The stars that rose from the lake
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: have found him. They have drifted upward and outward and
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: they have settled around the shape of Orion. The way
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: a frame settles around a painting, each one finding its place,
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: each one brightening as it settles. until what we are
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: looking at is not a constellation in the sky, but
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: a constellation in the air, hanging above the lake at
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: the height of the treetops, close enough to walk into.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: And so we do. I step forward. First, into the
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: space between the lowest stars and the air changes. It
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: is not colder, not warmer, but different, denser, somehow, as
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: if the light itself had weight. As if each photon
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: carried not just energy but presence, a kind of molecular
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: warmth that you feel not on your skin but in
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: your chest and the place behind your ribs where the
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: breath gathers before it becomes a sound. You follow. I
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: can feel you beside me, and I can feel the
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: stars around us. And I can feel the night, deep
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: and quiet, and infinitely patient, holding us both. Orion's belt
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: is above us. The three stars are no longer points
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: but disks, each one the size of a small coin
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: held at arm's length, each one a different shade of blue-white.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Alnato is the bluest, the deepest, like the heart of
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: a flame that is burned so hot it has forgotten
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: the color of fire. Al-Nilan is whiter, purer, the color
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: of fresh snow in moonlight, though there is no moon tonight.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: Mintaka is the palest, the most delicate. with a faint
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: warmth at its edges, like the first hint of dawn
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: on a winter morning. Below the belt, the great nebula hangs.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Or rather, the light of the nebula hangs, because the
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: real nebula is 500 light-years away. And what we are
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: seeing is not the cloud of geiss and dust itself,
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: but the memory of its light. a ghost of color
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: that has been traveling toward us since the time of
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: the Tudors. It is the most beautiful thing I have
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: ever seen at this distance, which is not very far
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: at all. A smear of light, greenish-pink like watercolor on
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: wet paper, spread across the darkness between the belt and
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: the bright red star at Orion's shoulder. Betelgeuse. Even I,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: who have spent years studying these stars, who know their
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: names and their distances and their spectral classifications, even I
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: am caught off guard by Betelgeuse. Because Betelgeuse is not
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: like the other stars. Betelgeuse is old. Betelgeuse is tired.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: Betelgeuse is a red supergiant that has burned through its
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: hydrogen and is now burning through its helium and will
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: one day burn through everything else and end not with
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: a whimper, but with a light so bright it will
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: be visible in the daytime sky, a second sun, a
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: temporary star, blazing for weeks before fading into a nebula
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: of its own. That is its future. But tonight it
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: is simply here, hanging in the sky like a red lantern,
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: the color of embers, the color of a fire that
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: has been burning all night and has settled into the deep,
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: steady warmth that comes only after the bright flames have gone.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: I reach out, not to touch it, but to feel
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: the space near it. And the warmth I find there
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: is not the warmth of fire. It is the warmth
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: of a room that has been lived in for a
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: long time. The warmth of a favorite chair. The warmth
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: of the stone floor in the common room on a
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: winter evening. When the fire has been burning since morning
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: and the stones have absorbed every degree of heat and
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: are giving it back, slowly, patiently, in a warmth that
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: will last through the night and into the morning and beyond.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: That is what old stars feel like. I say, to you,
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: to the night, to the lake. To anyone who might
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: be listening, not heat, memory of heat. Not light, memory
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: of light. And the older the star, the deeper the memory.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: And the deeper the memory, the more beautiful it becomes.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: Because beauty, at its root, is nothing more than time.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: Time made visible. Time made tangible. Time made something you
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: can hold in your hands. Or stand inside of. Or
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: walk beneath. On a still September night with someone you trust.
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: We stand inside Orion for a while. We breathe. We
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: let the light of the three belt stars settle on
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: our shoulders like a weightless mantle. And then, slowly, we
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: step back out, and the constellation drifts upward, returning to
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: its place in the sky. And we are left standing
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: on the grass by the lake, blinking, as if we
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: have just stepped out of a very bright room into
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: a very dark one. but the night is not finished
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: with us. Not by a long measure. The next constellation
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: is smaller, quieter, the kind that you have to be
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: told about before you can see it, not because it
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: is dim, but because it is humble. It does not
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: announce itself. It does not stride into the room. It
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: sits in the corner, Content to be noticed when it
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: is noticed and content to wait when it is not.
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: The plow. Seven stars. Four in a bowl. Three in
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: a handle. So perfectly shaped that once you have seen it,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: you cannot unsee it. It is there every night of
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: the year. circling the pole star like a dog circling
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: its master, never straying, never tiring, always present, always turning. Tonight,
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: it has come down to the greenhouses. I find it there.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: Among the glass panes, hanging just above the roof of
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: Greenhouse 3, where the mandrakes sleep in their pots and
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: the venomous Tanchicula has well itself around the central support
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: beam and is dreaming whatever dreams plants dream. The seven
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: stars of the plow are arranged in the air above
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: the glass. and their light is filtering down through the panes,
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: falling on the plants below and thin, precise lines, like
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: threads of gold laid across the dark leaves. Think push
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: open the greenhouse door. The air inside is different, humid, warm,
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: smelling of soil and chlorophyll and the sweet. slightly sour
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: smell of things that grow. The mandrakes are silent, as
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: they always are at this hour, their small root bodies
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: buried in dark earth, their leafy heads nodding in the
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: imperceptible breeze of the ventilation slats. The light from the
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: plow falls across their pots, and where it touches the soil,
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: Tiny green shoots are already pushing upward, reaching toward the
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: light with the slow, determined optimism that only plants possess.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: Did you know? I say kneeling beside one of the
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: pots that the stars have been helping things grow since
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: before anyone thought to plant a seed. The first farmers
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: looked up to know when to plant and when to harvest.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: The first gardeners timed their pruning by the mood and
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: the stars. And here, in this greenhouse, the plants have
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: always known. They do not need to look up. They
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: feel the light from above. Not just the sunlight, but
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: the starlight. Every night, falling through the glass, falling on
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: their leaves. And they do what they have always done.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: They grow. Slowly, quietly, without fanfare, without urgency. In the
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: way that all real growth happens, not all at once,
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: not in a burst of energy, but steadily. day by day,
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: night by night, until one morning you look at the
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: plant and realize it is taller than it was. and
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: greener than it was, and fuller than it was, and
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: you cannot pinpoint the moment it happened, because it did
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: not happen in a moment. It happened in a thousand moments.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: each one too small to notice, each one essential. The
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: plow's light moves across the greenhouse as the earth turns.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: I watch it travel from pot to pot, from shelf
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: to shelf, touching each plant with its particular blue-white light.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: Not the warm gold of sunlight, but the cooler, more
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: delicate light of stars, which is gentler, which asks less,
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: which gives more precisely what is needed and nothing extra.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: A mandrake leaf unfolds, slowly, in the light of the
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: pointer star. A tendril of the tentacula reaches toward the glass.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: drawn by a light it cannot see but can feel,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: a light that speaks to something deep in its cells,
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: something older than thought, older than need, older than the
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: distinction between wanting and having. I run my fingers along
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: the edge of a pot. The terracotta is warm and
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: rough beneath my fingertips. The way terracotta always is. Porous. Alive.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: Holding the memory of the water that has been poured
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: into it. And the hands that have held it. And
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: the soil that has pressed against its inner walls. On
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: the surface of the soil, a small spider is building
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: a web. It works in the starlight. moving with the precise,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: mechanical grace of a creature that has been doing this
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: since before there were words for doing. Each strand of
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: silt catches the light of the plow and holds it
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: momentarily before the strand becomes too thin to hold anything
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: at all and the light passes through. i watched this
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: spider for a long time long enough for it to
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: complete its web a perfect circle centred on a star
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: anchored to the rim of the pot and the edge
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: of the shelf long enough for the plough to move
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: a fraction of a degree across the sky long enough
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: for the warmth of the greenhouse to settle into my
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: bones and make my eyelids heavy and my breathing slow
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: and the space between my thoughts wider and wider, until
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: there are no thoughts at all, only the spider, only
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: the light, only the slow turning of the earth beneath us. Come,
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: I whisper, let us leave the plants to their dreaming.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: They have had their light for tonight, and there are
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: other constellations waiting. We leave the greenhouses and walk north
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: toward the place where the castle grounds end and the
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: forest begins. This is the boundary that students learn to
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: respect early in their time at Hogwarts, the line between
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: the tamed and the wild, between the mown grass and
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: the tangled undergrowth, between the world that has been made
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: safe for human habitation and the world that has not.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: But tonight the line is blurred. The forest, which usually
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: begins abruptly, a wall of dark trunks and tangled branches,
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: impenetrable even in daylight. Tonight begins gently, the way a
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: thought begins gently, rising from nothing, into something, from absence
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: into presence, from the blank page of the mind into
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: the first faint image of a word that has not
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: yet been spoken. The trees at the edge are silver birches,
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: their white bark catching the starlight and holding it so
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: that each trunk glows faintly like a candle seen through
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: frosted glass. Between the birches, the ground is carpeted with
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: fallen leaves, brown and gold, and the particular red of
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: autumn that has no name, the red of things that
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: are dying beautifully, which is the only way that things
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: ever really died. Above the birches. Cassiopeia. She's a shape
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: I have always loved. Not because she is beautiful, she is,
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: in fact, a little lopsided, her W-shape slightly crooked, as
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: if she has been tilted by something, some cosmic accident,
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: some ancient collision, but because she is persistent. She never sets.
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: She circles the pole star, like the plow. But where
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: the plow is practical and steady, Cassiopeia is theatrical, dramatic,
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: a queen who insists on being noticed. Even when the
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: angle is wrong, even when she is upside down, Even
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: when the other constellations have gone below the horizon and
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: left her alone in the sky. Tonight, she is not alone.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: She is standing at the edge of the forest. And
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: the stars of her W are arranged in the air
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: between the birch trees, and their light is falling through
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: the branches in long, angled beams like light through the
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: windows of a cathedral and the forest floor is dappled
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: with it. And the effect is so beautiful that I
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: stop walking and simply stand there, breathing, watching, feeling the
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: starlight on my face like the touch of a hand
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: I have been waiting for. The forest is quiet. Not
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: the silence of emptiness. The forest is never empty. It
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: is always full. Full of things that move and things
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: that grow and things that dream. But the silence of
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: a place that is paying attention, the kind of silence
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: that is not the absence of sound but the presence
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: of listening. Every creature in the forest is listening to
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: the stars. The owls have gone quiet in their hollows.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: The deer have stopped moving through the undergrowth. Even the
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: insects have paused, their usual evening chorus, reduced to the
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: occasional single note, like a musician tuning a string, waiting
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: for the right moment to begin. And the moment comes.
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: not with a sound, but with a light. A single
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: beam of starlight, brighter than the rest, falls through the
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: canopy and strikes the ground at my feet. It is
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: not white. It is not gold. It is a color
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: that I have seen only in this forest. Only on
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: nights like this, only when the stars are close enough
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: and the air is still enough and the earth is
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: quiet enough to hold the light without scattering it. It
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: is the color of water in deep shadow, not blue,
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: not green, but both, and neither, a color that exists
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: only in the place where blue and green meet and
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: merge and become something that neither could be alone. I kneel.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: I place my hand in the beam of light, and
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: the light passes through my fingers, as if they were glass, and,
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: on the other side, on the leaves I can see
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: the shadow of my hand, and the shadow is not dark,
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: it is lit. It is luminous. My hand, in the
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: light of Cassiopeia, becomes a thing of light, and I
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: am a thing of light, and the forest is a
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: thing of light, and the night is a thing of light,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: and everything is connected by this one beam that fell
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: from a star that is so far away that its
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: light has been traveling since before this forest grew. since
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: before this castle was built, since before the first person
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: looked up and thought, I am not alone in this.
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: I leave my hand in the light for a long time,
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: long enough for the warmth to travel from my fingertips
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: to my palm to my wrist, to the soft inner
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: skin of my forearm. Long enough for the muscles in
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: my shoulders to release, one by one, like knots being untied.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: Long enough for the breath to slow, to the point
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: where each inhale and each exhale feels like a complete thing.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: A whole thing, not a fragment of a larger pattern,
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: but the pattern itself. finished and whole and perfect in
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: its simplicity. Stars do not hurry, I say, to the forest,
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: to the light, to you. They have been burning since
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: before there were eyes to see them, and they will
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: continue burning, long after the last eye has closed. They
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: do not worry about being seen. They do not worry
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: about being named. They do not worry about being understood.
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: They simply burn. They simply are. And tonight, they have
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: come down to walk among us. To remind us that
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: we too can simply be. That we too can burn
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: in our own way, in our own time, without hurry,
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: without worry. without the need to be anything other than
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: what we are. The light fades, not all at once,
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: but gradually, the way a conversation fades when both parties
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: are too comfortable to need words. The beam narrows, softens,
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: becomes a glow, becomes a memory of a glow, becomes
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: nothing at all. And in its absence, the darkness is
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: deeper and richer and more beautiful than it was before.
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: Because the eyes have learned, in the moment of light,
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: how to see the dark. And the dark, seen properly,
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: is not dark at all. It is full. It is alive.
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: It is the color of the inside of a closed eyelid,
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: which is the color of rest, which is the color
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: of the mind when it finally, finally lets go. We
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: walk back from the forest edge, following the path that
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: curves south and east, past the stands of ancient oaks
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: that line the old footbridge. The bridge is not a
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: grand structure, not the kind of bridge that appears on
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: postcards or in paintings, with ornate railings and carved balustrades
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: and the names of architects inscribed in brass plaques. It
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: is a simple bridge, made of the same grey stone
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: as the castle. with low walls on either side and
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: a surface worn smooth by centuries of feet, it crosses
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: a narrow arm of the lake where the water is
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: shallow and still and the reeds grow tall, enough to
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: brush against the underside of the bridge when the wind
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: is up, which tonight it is not. On the Bridge
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: Something is waiting for us. Single star. Not a constellation,
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: not a pattern, not a group of lights arranged in
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: a shape that tells a story. Just one star, hanging
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: in the air above the center of the bridge at
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: about the height of a lantern, burning with a light
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: that is so steady. So unwavering, so absolutely still that
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: it seems less like a star and more like a
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: thought that someone has had and left hanging in the air.
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: Too beautiful to finish, too important to take back. I
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: stop walking. I stand at one end of the bridge,
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: and you stand at the other, and the star hangs
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: between us, and the lake stretches out on both sides,
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: black and still and full of stars, and the night
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: is so quiet that I can hear the water moving
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: beneath the bridge, not flowing, not rushing, but breathing the slow,
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: tidal breathing of a body of water that has been
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: here since the hill was young and the sky was
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: different and the stars were in other places. Make a wish,
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: I say. Not because I believe in wishing. I am,
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: after all, a person of science. of evidence, of measured
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: outcomes and reproducible results. I believe in the law of
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: conservation of energy and the second law of thermodynamics and
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: the precise, elegant mathematics that describe the motion of every
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: particle in the universe from the moment of its creation
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: to the moment of its annihilation. I do not believe
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: that saying a thing to a star will make it
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: come true. But I also know that there are things
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: that science has not yet measured, things that exist in
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: the spaces between the equations, in the gaps between the numbers,
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: in the silence between the notes of a piece of music,
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: and that the wish is one of them. Not because
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: it changes the world, but because it changes the wisher.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: When you wish on a star, you are not asking
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: the star for something. You are telling yourself what you want.
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: You are naming the thing that lives in the deepest
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: part of your heart, the thing you have been carrying
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: all day, all week, all year, the thing that is
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: too tender to say out loud to another person but
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: not too tender to say to a star. Because a
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: star will not judge you. A star will not laugh.
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: A star will not remember what you said and bring
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: it up later at an inconvenient moment. A star will
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: simply burn and hold your wish in its light and
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: carry it upward. Into the sky, where it joins all
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: the other wishes, all the other small. brave, impossible things
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: that people have asked the night for, and the night
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: has held them and kept them and never told anyone.
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: I close my eyes, I make my wish. It is
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: a small wish, a quiet wish, the kind that fits
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: inside a breath. And when I open my eyes, the
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: star is still there. still birding, still study. And I know,
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: without knowing how I know, that it has heard me.
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: Your turn? I say. You close your eyes. You make
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: your wish. And the star. And I swear this happened,
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: though I cannot prove it, though proof has never been
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: the point of stars. The star flickers. Just once. Just
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: for a moment. A small brief dimming, as if the
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: star blinked. As if it nodded. As if it said, yes,
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: I heard you. I will hold this for you. You
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: can let it go now. And you do. You let
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: it go. You open your eyes, and the wish is
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: not in your chest anymore. Not pressing against your ribs.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: Not keeping you awake at three in the morning. Turning
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: and turning and turning. The wish is in the star now.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: The star will keep it safe. The star has been
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: keeping things safe since before there were people to wish
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: for things. And it will keep them safe long after
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: the last wish has been made and the last star
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: has gone out and the universe has expanded to the
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: point where there is nothing left but light, spreading and
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: spreading and spreading, carrying with it all the wishes, all
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: the small, brave, impossible things, all the way to the
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: end and beyond. We cross the bridge. The star rises
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: as we pass beneath it, drifting upward like a lantern
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: released into the sky, joining the other stars, becoming indistinguishable
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: from them, becoming one of them. But you and I
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: will know. We will know which star's ours. We will
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: know where to look on clear September nights, years from now,
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: decades from now. When we are old and tired and
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: lying on our backs in the grass and the world
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: has gone soft and slow, we will look up and
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: we will find it and it will be burning, still, always,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: the way it has always burned, the way it always will.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: We climb. The stairs to the astronomy tower are narrow
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: and worn and the stone beneath our feet is cool
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: and smooth, polished by the passage of so many students.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: So many professors, so many late-night wanderers and early-morning astronomers
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: that the stone has been shaped by their footsteps into
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: something that is no longer quite stone. It is memory.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: It is time. It is the physical record of every
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: person who has ever climbed these stairs and their weight
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: and their pace and the particular way that tired feet
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: fall on worn stone when the person is too weary
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: to lift them properly but too restless to stay in bed.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: The air gets cooler as we climb. Not the sharp
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: cold of winter, but the cool of altitude. the cool
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: of being closer to the sky, where the air is
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: thinner and the stars are brighter, and the world below
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: becomes smaller and quieter and less real with each step.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: By the time we reach the top, the sounds of
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: the castle have fallen away entirely. No footsteps in the
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: corridors below, no voices in the common rooms. No distant
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: clatter from the kitchen where the house elves may still
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: be working, may always be working, may work even when
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: the castle sleeps. Because work is their language and the
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: night is their time. At the top the tower opens
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: to the sky. The parapet is cold beneath my hands.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: The stone is old, so old that the edge has
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: been worn round, so old that the surface has taken
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: on the texture of the sky itself, pitted and vast
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: and bearing the marks of things that happened so long ago,
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: that even the marks have marks. The brass auri stands
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: in the center of the platform, its polished surfaces catching
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: the starlight and throwing it back in small, precise reflections
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: that move slowly across the stone as the Earth turns.
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: The astrolabe sits beside it, its rings and arcs forming
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: a model of the sky that is so accurate so
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: perfectly aligned with the real sky above, that for a
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: moment you cannot tell which is the model and which
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: is the truth, whether the brass rings are describing the
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: sky or the sky is describing the brass rings. I sit.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: I sit on the lowest step of the aureus mounting,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: where the stone is slightly warmer than the parapet, warmed
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: by the residual heat of the brass above. You sit
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: beside me, and we look up. The sky from the
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: Astronomy Tower is different from the sky anywhere else in
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: the castle. Not because it is a different sky. It
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: is the same sky, the same stars, the same constellations,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: but because from here, at the highest point, with nothing
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: above you but air and light and the infinite dark,
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: the sky feels closer. It feels personal. It feels as
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: if the stars are not above you, but around you.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: as if you are inside the sky, as if the
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: sky is not a ceiling but a room, and you
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: are in the center of it, and every star is
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: a light in the room, and the room has no
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: walls and no floor and no ceiling, only light, only depth,
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: only the slow, patient turning of everything. And tonight, The
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: constellations are still close. They have not returned to the sky,
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: or perhaps they have. But they have left something behind.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: A residue of light. A memory of their presence. That
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: makes the air between the stars seem thicker, richer, more
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: full of meaning than it usually does. The plow is
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: still visible in the northwest. It's seven stars diminished, but
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: not gone. Orion is sinking toward the wester horizon, his
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: belt just touching the tops of the distant hills. And
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: high above, almost directly overhead, the Pleiades, the seven sisters,
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: are burning with the particular clarity that comes only from
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: seeing them from a high place on a clear night,
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: each star distinct. each star a separate point of light,
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: though they are so close together that on a less
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: clear night they blur into a single cluster, a small,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: bright smudge, like a thumbprint on the glass of the sky.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: I want to tell you about the Pleiades. I want
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: to tell you that they are not seven at all,
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: that there are hundreds of stars in the cluster. Thousands.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: That's the seven we can see with the naked eye
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: are only the brightest, the ones that insist on being seen,
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: while the others hide behind them, too small, too dim,
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: too modest, to push themselves forward. But I do not
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: tell you this, because tonight is not a night for numbers.
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: Tonight is a night for the seven stars we can
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: see and for the darkness between them and for the
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: particular quality of silence that exists at the top of
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: a tower, at the center of the sky, at the
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: heart of the night. The wind changes. It comes from
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: the north, carrying the cold of the upper air, and
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: it moves across the tower with the slow, deliberate pace
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: of a thing that has nowhere to be and all
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: the time to get there. It passes over my hands
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: on the parapet and my hands are cool. And the
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: cool is not unpleasant but refreshing, like a glass of
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: water after a long walk, like the first breath of
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: morning air after a night of sleep. I lean back
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: against the stone. The tower is solid beneath me, rooted
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: deep in the earth, reaching up through the air, touching
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: the sky. I am part of it. My spine against
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: the stone, my breath in the air, my eyes in
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: the stars. I am a creature of earth and air
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: and light. And right now, in this moment, at the
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: center of the sky, on the top of the tower,
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: I am all three at once, and none of them
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: in particular, and the distinction between body and air and
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: stone has dissolved, and there is only the night, only
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: the light, only the slow, deep breathing of the world
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: as it turns. There is a time, in every night,
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: when the stars begin to feel heavy. Not the heaviness
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: of exhaustion, not the heaviness of burden, but the heaviness
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: of contentment, of fullness, of a glass filled to the brim.
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: This is the time when the eyes have been open
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: for too long and the mind has been still for
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: too long and the body knows, with the deep animal
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: certainty that comes from millions of years of evolution, that
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: it is time to close, to rest, to let the
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: night do what the night does, which is to hold
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: you and heal you and return you to yourself, gently, patiently,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: in its own time. We are at that time now.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: The constellations are fading, not because the stars are going out.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: Stars do not go out, not in a single night,
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: not in a single lifetime, but because our eyes are closing.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: And when the eyes close, the stars that were outside
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: become stars that are inside. carried in the dark of
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: the closed lids, moving gently in the currents of the blood,
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: spinning slowly in the orbits of the mind. I feel
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: it in my hands. They are resting on my knees,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: and they are heavy. Each finger a weight. Each nail
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: a small moon. each knuckle a planet in a system
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: of such complexity and beauty that no astronomer has ever
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: mapped it fully, no scientist has ever explained it completely.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: My hands are tired. They've held books today and quills
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: and teacups and the handles of doors and the edges
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: of papers and each of those things has left its
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: weight in my hands. And the weight is good. And
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: the weight is real. And the weight is the proof
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: that I've lived today. That I have touched things. That
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: I have been present in the world. That I have
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: not merely passed through it like a ghost or a dream.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: I feel it in my eyes. They are heavy, too.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: Each eye like a curtain, each lash, a line of
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: the curtain's hem, each tear, for there are tears, not
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: of sadness, but of the particular kind of happiness that
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: comes from being so completely, so thoroughly, so entirely present
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: that the body responds with the only language it knows
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: for this kind of fullness which is water which is
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: salt which is the taste of the sea that is
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: in every tear because the sea is where we came
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: from and the sea is where we will go And
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: the sea is the thing that connects every living thing,
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: every breathing thing, every dreaming thing, across every distance, across
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: every time, across every boundary that the mind has tried
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: to draw and the heart has refused to honor. The
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: stars are setting now. not all at once, but one
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: by one, each in its own time, each with its
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: own grace. The ones in the west go first, the
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: ones closest to the horizon, the ones that have been
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: burning since the afternoon and are tired, the way we
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: are tired, the way all things are tired at the
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: end of a long day. They sink slowly behind the hills,
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: and the hills close over them like hands closing over
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: a candle. And the light is gone, and the darkness
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: is deeper, and the night is older, and the world
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: is one step closer to morning, though morning is still
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: a long way off, hours away, lifetimes away, and we
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: are in no hurry to meet it. I close my eyes.
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: Like because I am done with the night, I am
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: never done with the night. The night is too beautiful
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: to be done with. But because the night has given
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: me what it came to give, and the gift is
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: the kind that must be held with closed eyes, the
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: kind that is too bright to look at directly, the
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: kind that must be experienced in the dark, the way
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: music must be experienced with the eyes closed, the way
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: prayer must be experienced with the head bowed, the way
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: love must be experienced with the heart open and the
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: defenses down and the walls down and the walls dissolved
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: and the walls forgotten, as if they had never been built,
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: as if the only thing that had ever existed was
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: the thing behind them, which is the thing itself, which
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: is the light itself, which is the star itself, burning
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: in the center of the closed eyes, patient and eternal
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: and yours. We go down. The stairs are different going
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: down than going up. Going up, you are aware of
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: the effort, the work, the climb. Going down, you are
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: aware of the release, the surrender, the slow letting go
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: of gravity's claim. Each step is easier than the last.
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: Each landing is softer. The stone beneath our feet is
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: warm now, warmed by the heat of our bodies as
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: we climbed, as if the tower has learned our temperature
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: and is holding it, keeping it for us, a gift
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: for the descent. I count the steps, not because I
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: need to. I have climbed these stairs so many times
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: that I could do it in my sleep. And perhaps
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: I am doing it in my sleep now, or something
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: very like sleep, a state between waking and dreaming where
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: the feet know what to do and the mind is
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: free to wander. I count because the counting is soothing,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: because the rhythm of it
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: steps from the tock to the first
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: landing a window narrow and tall through which the moon
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: which is not yet risen will one day shine for
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: now the window shows only stars and the stars are
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: so close that i could reach through the glass and
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: touch them and the glass is so clean that it
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: might not be there at all might be only a
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: suggestion of glass a possibility of glass a ghost of
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: the material that once held the light and now lets
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: it pass freely as if it had learned over the
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: centuries that some things are better shared than held 47
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: more steps to the second landing. The air is warmer here,
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: closer to the castle's interior warmth, the warmth of hearths
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: and corridors and the collective heat of a building that
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: is alive in the way that old buildings are alive.
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: not with glide and breath, but with stone and mortar
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: and the accumulated energy of every footstep and every voice
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: and every fire that has ever burned within its walls.
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: The portraits on the walls are asleep. I can see
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: them through the half-open door of a corridor, a knight
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: in armor, slumped forward in his frame. his helmet resting
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: on the arm of a chair. A lady in green,
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: her head tilted to one side. Her eyes closed, her
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: hands folded in her lap. A wizard in purple who
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: appears to be snoring, though it is possible that this
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: is his usual expression, and he is merely dreaming the
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: way he always dreams, with his mouth slightly open, his
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: eyebrows slightly raised, and his face arranged in the particular
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: expression of someone who is having a dream that is
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: either very good or very strange and is not entirely
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: sure which. I smile at the sleeping portraits. They do
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: not see me smile. They are in their frames, in
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: their worlds, in the particular dimension of time and space
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: that portraits inhabit, which is adjacent to ours but not
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: quite overlapping, like two rooms in the same house that
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: share a wall but not a door. But I smile anyway.
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: Because smiling at sleeping things is one of the kindest
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: gestures a person can make. And because the portraits, even asleep,
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: are part of the castle and the castle is part
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: of the night. And the night is part of us.
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: The final stairs are the longest. They curve in a
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: wide spiral. hugging the inner wall of the tower and
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: the light from above the starlight pouring down through the
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: open tuck of the tower falls through the central space
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: in a column a pillar of light a beam that
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: narrows as it descends like light through a funnel until
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: it reaches the ground floor and spreads across the stone
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: in a perfect circle a dist of starlight a pool
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: So Dolphineshin said, I stuck into it. My feet are
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: in the starlight, and the starlight is cool on my
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: bare skin. I had removed my shoes at the top
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: of the tower, as I always do, because the stone
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: is smooth and cool and it feels better barefoot. It
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: feels more honest, more connected, as if the removal of
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: shoes is the removal of a barrier between self and world.
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: The starlight moves around my feet like water around stones
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: in a stream, flowing past, never touching, always near. Think
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: step in too. I feel the warmth of you beside me,
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: the particular warmth of a person who has been walking
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: and is now standing still. whose blah is warm and
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: whose breath is slow and whose presence is, in this moment,
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: the most real thing in the world. We stand together
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: in the circle of starlight and we breathe and the
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: breath is enough and the silence is enough and the
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: night is enough. And we are enough, exactly as we are,
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: in this moment, in this place, under the sky, with
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: these stars, in this castle, on this earth, in this universe,
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: that is so large and so old and so beautiful,
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: that the only appropriate response to it is to stop
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: and be still and let it be what it is,
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: which is everything, which is more than enough, which is
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: the thing that all the searching and All the striving
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: and all the climbing was for the thing that was
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: always here, waiting, patient, eternal, like the stars. We walk
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: back across the grounds. The path is familiar now. We
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: have walked it so many times that it knows us,
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: the way a well-worn path knows the feet that have
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: worn it. the way a favorite chair knows the body
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: that has shaped it, the flagstones are cool beneath our feet.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: The grass on either side is silver with dew. The
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: night has been busy while we were in the tower,
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: depositing its moisture, atom by atom, on every surface, every blade,
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: every leaf, every petal, until the whole world is damp
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: and gleaming and faintly luminous in the starlight, as if
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: the night has been quietly, patiently, thoroughly watering the earth
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: while we were not looking. The lake is on our left,
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: black and still, and mirror smooth. The stars are in
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: it again, all of them, every star in the sky,
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: reflected in the water with such perfection that if you
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: did not know which was up and which was down,
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: you would not be able to tell. The reflection is
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: not a copy. It is a companion. The real sky
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: and the reflected sky are not the same sky. Not exactly.
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: Because the real sky is the sky and the reflected
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: sky is an idea of the sky, a thought about
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: the sky, a dream of the sky, and ideas and
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: thoughts and dreams are not the same as the things
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: they describe, though they are beautiful in their own way,
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: beautiful in the way that all representations are beautiful, because
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: they are the things that the mind makes when it
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: cannot hold the real thing. when the real thing is
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: too large, too far, too much, and the mind needs
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: a version it can carry, a version it can hold
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: in its hands, a version it can take home and
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: keep on the shelf and look at when it needs
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: to remember what the real thing looked like. We passed
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: the greenhouses. The glass is dark now but behind it
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: I can see the faint green of the plants, still growing,
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: still reaching, still doing the thing that plants do which
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: is to take the light and turn it into life.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: The plow has moved on, risen higher in the sky
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: and the light that falls through the glass is starlight now,
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: not plow light. But the plants do not know the difference.
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: They take what falls on them and they grow. They
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: are the most faithful creatures I know. The door to
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: the library is still open. I had left it open,
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: I realize, when we stepped out and the night air
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: has been drifting in through the gap. carrying the smell
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: of grass and water and stone and the faint sweet
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: smell of the dew itself, which smells of everything and nothing,
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: which smells of the world being washed clean, which smells
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: of the particular freshness that comes after a day has
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: ended and a night has begun and the earth has decided, quietly,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: without fuss to start over. Inside, the candles have burned low.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: The one at the desk is a stub. It's flame
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: guttering in the draft from the door, throwing shadows on
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: the walls that move and stretch and contract like the
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: shadows of things that are dreaming. The one on the
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: small table beside your chair has gone out entirely. leaving
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: only a thin trail of smoke that rises, in the
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: still air, straight up, a vertical line of grey in
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: the darkness, so straight and so still that it might
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: be a thread, might be a wire, might be the
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: thinnest possible connection between the table and the ceiling, between
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: the earth and the sky, between the place where the
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: candle was and the place where its light has gone.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: I light a new candle. A small flame. A small warmth.
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: A small point of light in the darkness. And the
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: darkness accepts it. The way the night accepts the stars,
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: not as an invasion, not as an interruption, but as
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: a participant, a contributor, one more light in the constellation
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: of lights that make up the evening, each one small,
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: each one necessary. Each one a story that the darkness
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: is telling itself about itself. I settle into my chair.
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: The chair is old, wooden with arms, that have been
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: worn smooth by the pressure of elbows and the passage
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: of years. The cushion is thin but soft, and it
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: gives beneath me in the particular way that old cushions give.
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: Not collapsing, not yielding, but accommodating, adjusting, finding the shape
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: of my body and holding it with the gentle insistence
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: of a thing that has been holding people for a
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: long time and has learned the art of it. The
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: art of supporting without constraining, of cradling without gripping, of
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: being present without being noticed, You settle into yours. The
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: chair beside mine. The one I have been saving for
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: you all evening. The one that has your shape in
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: it already. The impression of all the times you have
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: sat in it before. The warmth of all the evenings
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: you have spent in this library. Listening to my voice.
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: Watching the candlelight. Feeling the night settle around you like
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: a blanket. The library is quiet. Not the silence of
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: an empty room we are in it, we too, and
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: our breathing fills it with sound, with rhythm, with life.
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: But the silence of a room that is at peace
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: with itself, that has accepted its purpose, that knows what
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: it is for and is doing it, which is to say,
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: holding space, holding warmth, holding light, holding us. I look
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: at you across the small space between our chairs. The
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: candlelight is soft on your face, warm and gold, the
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: way candlelight always is. Because candlelight is not white light,
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: it is yellow, orange, the color of fire, at its gentlest,
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: at its most domestic, at its most willing to be shared.
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: Your eyes are heavy. I can see it. The lids
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: are lowering. Not all at once, but in stages, each
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: blink a little longer than the last, each opening a
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: little narrower, each closing a little more final. You're falling.
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: You are falling the way a leaf falls, not quickly.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: Not dramatically, but slowly, turning, drifting, caught on the currents
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: of the warm air that rises from the last ember
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: of the fire. And I am falling, too. My voice
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: is slower now. Lower. The words more spaced. The pauses longer.
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: Not because I am tired. Though I am, I am.
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: I am deeply, thoroughly, beautifully tired. But because the night
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: has earned this slowness. The night has been patient with us.
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: It has shown us its stars, its constellations. It's light.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: It has walked with us through the grounds and the
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: forest and the tower and the bridge. It has given
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: us everything it has. And now it asks for only
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: one thing in return. That we rest. That we close
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: our eyes. That we let it hold us. The way
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: it holds the stars. The way it holds the lake.
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: the way it holds the earth, gently, completely, without condition,
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: without expectation, without demand. The last stars are visible through
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: the high windows of the library. They are the same
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: stars we saw on the bridge, the same stars we
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: saw at the lake. The same stars we saw from
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: the tower. But they are different now. Because we are
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: different now. We have walked with them. We have stood
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: inside them. We have made wishes on them. And they
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: have changed us. The way all beautiful things change you.
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: Not by adding something. not by taking something away, but
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: by revealing what was already there, the thing that was
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 1: always there, beneath the surface, beneath the noise, beneath the
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: weight of the day, and the worry and the hurry
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: and the need, the stillness, the light, the quiet, the peace.
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: It is there now. I can feel it. Can you
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: feel it? It is in the center of your chest,
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: in the space between your heartbeats, in the pause between
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: your breaths. It is not a feeling, exactly. It is
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: more like an absence of feeling, an absence of urgency,
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: of worry, of the constant, low-level hum of the mind
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: that says, what next? What now? What about? What if?
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: That hum has stopped. It is stopped because the knight
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: has asked it to stop, and the knight is very persuasive,
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: and the knight has been asking for a long time,
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: and the hum finally has agreed. The candle flickers. The
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: flame dips, straightens, dips again, as if it is breathing,
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: as if it is alive, as if it is doing
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: what we are doing, slowing, settling, preparing for the long,
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: deep rest that comes at the end of a night
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: that has been well spent. I reach across the small
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: space between our chairs and take your hand. My hand
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: is warm. Yours is warm. The warmth passes between us.
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: Not as energy. not as heat, but as something older
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: and simpler than either of those things, as presence, as
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: the simple, wordless, irreducible fact of being here, together, in
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: this room, at this hour and this night, under these stars. Sleep.
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: I say. not as a command, not as a suggestion,
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: as an invitation, as the most natural thing in the world.
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: As the thing that the body has been waiting for
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: all day, the thing that the mind has been working
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: toward all evening, the thing that the night has been
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: preparing for since the first star appeared, since the first
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: star rose from the lake, since the first star walked
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: across the castle grounds and led us to the tower
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: and showed us the sky and brought us back. Flat. Fine,
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: fine thing. Think just when. Luke would never include the
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: sly departmental world book of each age you Dutch Z.A. Jane,
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: with your tent-darferin, for it quite, the seas the sweth said,
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: the sweth feared. Think to slap, think to, mean of
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: the slap, I say again, and my voice is barely
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: a voice, now barely a sound, more a warmth than
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: a vibration, more a feeling than a word, more a
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: hand laid gently, on your shoulder than a mouth forming syllables. Sleeped,
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: my dear, the stars will keep watch. The castle will
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: hold you. The night will cradle you. And in the morning,
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: when the light comes back, and it will come back,
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: it always does, it always has, it always will. You
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: will wake and you will be rested and you will
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: be whole and you will be ready for another day.
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: But that is tomorrow, this is now. And now there
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: is only sleep, only rest. Only the deep, dark, warm, quiet, endless,
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: beautiful nothing that is the most something you will ever feel.
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: I close my eyes. The candle goes out. The library
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: is dark and the stars are in the windows and
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: the night is in the room and you are in
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: the chair and the chair is in the library. And
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: the library is in the castle. And the castle is
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: in the grounds. And the grounds are in the valley.
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: And the valley is in the world. And the world
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: is in the sky. And the sky is in the stars.
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: And the stars are in you. And you are in
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: the stars. And there is no difference between any of
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: these things. There never was. There never will be. And
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: the thought of a difference is just a thought. And
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: the thought can be released. Now, at this hour, in
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: this moment. Release the way a star releases its light. Gently. Freely. Completely.
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: Without reservation. Without regret. Without anything held back. Sleep. Sleeped.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: The stars are burning. The night is deep. Your home.
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: End of episode 17. This episode was created with AI assistance.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: The dreamlike journey through the living constellations, from the Black
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: Lake to the Astronomy Tower, was crafted to guide you
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: gently toward rest. Before we climb the tower, there is
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: one more thing I want to show you. It is
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: not a constellation, not a fixed pattern of stars that
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: repeats night after night, century after century, in the same place,
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: in the same sky. It is something different, something that moves,
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: something that wanders. The word planet comes from the Greek
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: and it means wanderer. The ancient Greeks looked up and
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: noticed that most of the stars stayed where they were,
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: locked in their patterns, faithful to their positions, turning with
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: the sky the way the numbers on a clock turn
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: with the clock. But a few did not. A few moved.
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: A few drifted, slowly across the fixed stars, taking weeks
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: and months and years to complete their journeys, appearing sometimes
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: in one constellation and sometimes in another, sometimes bright and
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: sometimes dim, as if they were not sure where they
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: were going and were content to let the sky decide. Tonight,
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: two of these wanderers are visible. Jupiter, the largest, the brightest,
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: the king of the planets, is hanging low in the east,
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: near the constellation Taurus, its light so strong that it
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: casts a faint shadow. A shadow you can see if
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: you hold your hand at arm's length and look very
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: carefully at the darkness your fingers make against the sky.
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: Not a dark shadow. A luminous shadow. a shadow made
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: of less light rather than no light. Because when the
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: sky is this bright with stars, even darkness is full
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: of light. And Saturn, dimmer, smaller, but no less present,
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: no less beautiful, no less significant. Saturn is higher in
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: the sky, near the constellation Aquarius, and its light is
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: steadier than Jupiter's, calmer, as if Saturn has learned something
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: that Jupiter has not, something about patience, about the long game,
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: about the particular beauty that comes not from being the
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: brightest thing in the sky, but from being the most enduring.
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: I look at them, both of them, and I think
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: about the time they take. Jupiter completes its journey around
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: the Sun in 12 years. Saturn takes 30. 30 years
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: to return to the place where it started. 30 years
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: to walk the circle once. That is a long time.
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: By the measure of human life, which is measured in decades,
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: not centuries, in heartbeats, not orbits, But by the measure
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: of the stars, thirty years is nothing. A blink, a breath,
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: a single tick of a clock that has been ticking
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: since the beginning of time and will continue ticking long
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: after time has stopped meeting anything at all. And yet
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: within those 30 years, within those 12 years, within even
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: a single human year there is so much. There is
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: this night. There is this walk. There is this moment,
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: right now, when the air is cool. And the stars
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: are bright and your hand is warm in mine and
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: the world is exactly as large as it needs to
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: be and exactly as small as it needs to be
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: and exactly as quiet as it needs to be and
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: exactly as beautiful as it has always been, which is
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: to say, more beautiful than we can possibly understand but
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: not too beautiful to enjoy. Jupiter blinks. Not a true blink.
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: Planets do not blink. Planets reflect. And the reflection is
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: steady because the distance is fixed and the angle changes
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: only with the turning of the Earth. But the atmosphere
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: between us and Jupiter is not fixed. It moves. in
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: currents and eddies and layers of different temperatures, and the
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: light passes through it and is bent and refracted and scattered,
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: and the result is a light that trembles, that flickers,
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: that seems, to the tired eye, to be winking at you,
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: as if Jupiter knows you are looking and wants you
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: to know that it sees you, too. Saturn is above
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: the worst of the atmosphere, higher in the sky, where
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: the air is thinner and the light passes through it
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: more cleanly. Saturn's light is a steady glow, a constant,
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: a fixed point in a sky of moving things. And
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: there is something deeply comforting in that steadiness, in that
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: refusal to flicker, in that commitment to being exactly what
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: it is, in the same way, in the same place,
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: night after night, year after year, orbit after orbit, without variation,
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: without complaint, without the need to be anything other than Saturn,
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: I look at these two wanderers, Jupiter, bright and restless,
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: and Saturn, dim and steady, and I think, we are
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: all wanderers. We are all planets, circling our own suns,
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: following our own orbits, sometimes bright and sometimes dim, sometimes
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: close to the thing we orbit and sometimes far, sometimes
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: in the light and sometimes in the shadow. And the
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 1: only difference between a planet and a star is that
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: a planet reflects light while a star creates it. But
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: even that difference is not so great. Because reflection is
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: its own kind of creation. The way a mirror creates
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: a world that does not exist. The way a memory
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: creates a moment that has already passed. The way a
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: dream creates a future that has not yet arrived. Reflection
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: is not. Lesser than creation, it is a different. Kind
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: of creation. It is creation with permission. Creation with gratitude.
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: Creation that says I have been given something and I
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: will return it. Changed. Transformed. Made beautiful by the act
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: of returning. You are a wanderer too. You have wandered
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: tonight through the castle grounds, through the constellations, through the
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: forest and the tower and the bridge and the library.
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: You have wandered through the sky and the water and
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: the air and the stone. You have wandered through the
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: light of stars that have been burning since before you
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: were born and will be burning long after you are gone.
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: And the wandering has changed you, the way all wandering
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: changes you. Not by taking you somewhere new, but by
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: showing you that everywhere is new, that everywhere is strange
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: and beautiful and worthy of wonder, that the ground beneath
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: your feet is as miraculous as the sky above your head,
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: that the breath in your lungs is as miraculous as
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: the light in the stars. Look up one last time.
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: Look up at Jupiter and Saturn at the Wanderers, at
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: the planets. At the things that move through the fixed
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: stars the way we move through the fixed world. Slowly, patiently,
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: in our own time, in our own way. Following the
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: path that was set for us long before we were born.
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 1: The path of gravity and light and the invisible forces
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: that hold everything together. That keep the planets in their orbits.
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: that keep the stars in the sky, that keep the
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: world turning, that keep us alive, that keep us here
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: in this moment, in this night, under these stars, together.