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If you think of feelings you have when you are awed by something - for example, knowing that elements in your body trace to exploded stars - I call that a spiritual reaction, speaking of awe and majesty, where words fail you.
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
Last summer I was sitting around a campfire with family and good friends high in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains. The kids were making s'mores and playing card games, all talking at once. The adults were sipping whiskey and telling tall tales of youthful exploits long since past. We watched the flickering yellow, orange and blue flames licking at the firewood, adjusting our chairs to keep the smoke from our eyes when the breeze shifted.
We looked at the sky too. More than 7,000 feet above sea level on a moonless night, the stars were in abundance. Occasionally a plane would fly soundlessly overhead reminding us that, even in the starry heavens, civilization is never very far away. Someone pointed out satellites, which to my untrained eye were hard to distinguish from stars. Human fingerprints are on everything, aren't they?
And then -- because vast amounts of information are literally at our fingertips, even high in the Sierra -- one of us pulled out a smart phone and downloaded an app that maps when and where the International Space Station is visible from Earth. To our delight, the ISS would be in view in the next half an hour. The app provided coordinates so we would know exactly which corner of the sky to focus our attention on, and informed us that the ISS travels at a speed of 5 miles per second -- 25 times faster than a 747, nine times the speed of a bullet!
A few minutes before viewing time, we grabbed our flashlights and left the warmth and light of the campfire to head down by the lake where it was darker. While we waited, we danced our flashlights across the lake, attracting bats as they darted above the water in search of their evening meal. A moment before the scheduled time, we grew quiet and focused our attention on a mountain ridge on the far side of the lake.
Right on schedule a light ascended above the ridge, rising into the starry sky. It didn't look like much. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you might think it was an airplane or a satellite, or you might not notice it at all. But we knew what we were looking for. We knew that there were people living and working on that small light in the distance. We knew that the ISS travels around the Earth in 92 minutes and is roughly the size of a football field. We watched the small light rise into the sky. It was only visible for a minute or two before it slowly faded out of sight, swallowed up by the darkness.
We stood by the lake for a moment longer, awed by the stars and the mountains and the bats on the lake. We had just seen the International Space Station rise into the starry sky and then fade away into the night. We switched on our flashlights and walked back to camp, returning to our card games and companionship, our small community of love and friendship gathered around the flickering light of a campfire high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And we knew that this too was worthy of awe.
