Nightfall ...

I am reclining in my tent. Since the sun dropped below the horizon, the air temperature has dropped rapidly. My propane lamp warms the tent, not quite adequately, against the chill. Outside, it is completely dark now. Earlier, the air was filled with the chorus of coyote, as their scattered bands serenaded each other across the hills. Even now I hear the bellowing of the bison, less than a hundred yards away.

I step outside my tent. The sky is cloudless, no moon yet. It has been a long time since I have seen the Milky Way as bright and clear as I see it tonight. I look up into the sky, trying to catch the whole vision at once. It's not possible. It is just too big. Staring at the Milky Way, and the myriad individual stars, I suddenly get an uncanny sense of depth perception. I see not a ceiling dotted with lights, but a splash that seems to stretch from almost a nearness that can be touched, to a receding array of glittering embers, to the dense but muted glow of billions of stars that fade away into unimaginable remoteness.

My tent is a tiny bump in the midst of an enormous hilly grassland, gashed in places by the deep eroded cuts that become the badlands. These lands, which stretch many times beyond my sight, are but a minor piece of real estate on a larger blue, green, brown and white globe.

This globe is a speck, bound by Einstein's gravity expressed in a reduced form as Newtonian mechanics, around the sun - a thermonuclear rage that would swallow the whole planet without so much as a puff. This star is a minor player in a cast of billions, delegated to a peripheral role on the edge of the galaxy that I try to fathom this night.

But even this Milky Way galaxy, whose enormity is just barely perceivable enough to bring forth these thoughts, would be lost amongst the haze of billions of greater and lesser galaxies.

It is an unfathomable immenseness that should make one feel less than tiny, essentially nothing - but simply being able to see into it on a night like this, I feel expanded into it all, beyond my measurable physical bounds.