Small Problems Under a Big Sky
Serendipity and Perspective Taking
My big sky
Sometimes I allow my small problems to feel like big problems. Lately I’ve found myself fretting over the small things. What will I do about my too wet field after all the rainy winter? Is it time for another fight with the insurance company about coverage for a minor, but expensive, medical procedure? Do I have enough help so that I can leave the farm for a couple of days? I know these are minor problems, even good problems to have. (It could be an insurance fight over a big medical procedure!) Yet, they take up too much of the space in my head, and they get stuck there.
On a night last week, after a day of too much fretting, as I was walking out of the barn after night check, I looked up to see the most magnificent night sky. There was a crescent moon with two brilliant stars almost perfectly aligned above it. (I later found out from my astronomy-minded husband that those were actually planets, Venus and Jupiter, on a night when they were particularly bright.) They burned a hole through the blackness so bright that the impossibility of their starness swept over me.
They had to be planes. They were not. They were steadfast, immobile, seemingly twinkling just like in the childhood nursery rhyme. The light was so brilliant that it gave the pines on the horizon an other-worldly outline. When I saw it, I reacted the way I often do when I stumble upon something so unspeakably beautiful in the natural world. I stopped breathing for a moment, then took a really deep breath and remembered how vast and amazing the natural world is.
Sparkling March morning
The immensity of that night sky reminded me of my own smallness, and even more importantly, how small my problems were in contrast to that enormity. It wasn’t a fatalistic moment, more of a perspective-taking moment, a moment of serendipity. I was awash in gratitude that I stumbled upon the alignment of those beacons of brightness and their power to bestow perspective.
I find this serendipity-inspired perspective often when I am outside in the flower field, walking the dogs, or caring for the horses. Something about being in nature lets me uncover something hidden, something awe-inspiring. Moments like stumbling upon this night sky allow me to put my annoyances into perspective.
Frozen sunflower
The moon in the sky that night was my reminder to look up, to look out, to see beyond myself and my hurdles. It’s the same pause I experience when I see the first seasonal blooms, their color, their shape, the miracle of their existence, the reminder that seasons come and go—a reminder that all is temporal.
It’s that feeling that hurries me to the flower field in the mornings in warmer seasons. What new bloom will have opened? What color will unfurl? As March dawned with a clear blue, frosty morning, and the promise of longer, warmer days is on the horizon, I look forward to the built-in serendipity of the flower field, and I feel grateful for the perspective the natural world keeps giving me, day after day, despite my never-ending inclination to let my small problems feel big.
