Under the play of heaven

August brings the Perseids: the nights of shooting stars. We lie on our backs and look up, point and count, drinking in the warm summer light to remember later when the skies get colder and the nights are long.

Of course, shooting stars aren’t stars at all but meteor showers made of space dust and rocks left behind in the wake of comets. Each year in its orbit, the Earth passes through these dust clouds around the same dates, and the bright, burning lights we see are the dust that burns up in our atmosphere. We name them after the nearest constellation, and as these August meteors originate from near the Perseus constellation, we call them the Perseids, remembering the Greek stories of Perseus, the slayer of Medusa. The Perseids’ comet is more prosaically called Swift-Tuttle, after Lewis Swift of Marathon, New York, and Horace Tuttle at the Harvard Observatory who visually discovered it separately in July 1862. Later, researchers determined that it was also observed in 69 BC and 188 AD, as it travelled its 133-year orbit. We have been looking up for a long time and watching this playful dance.

Restless feet

Not all meteors burn up in the atmosphere. Some make it to the ground, and then we call them meteorites. Others – meteoroids – stay in space and range in size from tiny grains of dust to small asteroids. Which brings to mind Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince who lived on Asteroid B-612. I remember the vivid illustration inside the front cover of my copy: the Prince, in his yellow scarf, lifting off from his planet, his feet just afloat, his hands clutching strings attached to flying birds. “In order to make his escape, I believe he took advantage of a migration of wild birds.”

Barry Lopez, writing about animal migration, described how adolescent birds make their own paths, leaving the established routes and corridors to explore farther afield. It is thought that they choose to explore territories adjacent to their home range so that they will know where to turn in an emergency. And maybe that’s as good an explanation as any.

But we’ve been young, too. We know what it feels like. That restlessness that makes you want to try new things. That thirst for escape. That playful testing of convention that pulls you out to see more of the world.

Open vistas

This month, my daughter will be leaving home to study in Canada. Though we’ve been living in Wales for most of the past decade, it is the right decision. We’ll travel together as a family, the five of us heading west across the Atlantic, then four heading east and home again after three weeks of holiday. I can’t quite think yet about that strange journey home, so I’m keeping my eyes on our arrival, which falls at the height of the Perseids. We’ll be arriving in Montreal, but I hope we can find our way out of the city after a night or two to find darker skies and open vistas. I want to watch the play of stars above me and feel the bright joy of those racing stars, each one different, yet each year, just the same, they fall and shine, and we keep faith despite all changes and keep looking up.