Photographing the heavens in my neck of the woods.

I have turned into a kind of nocturnal photographer, heading out on clear and moonless nights to parts far from the town and city lights, revisiting old places I’ve been to and scouting for new ones from which to take photos of the Milky Way. It has become my all-consuming pastime of late constantly monitoring the weather, studying maps, and getting up in the middle of the night driven by the desire to create art from what little light trickles down from the dark heavens above, by seeing the Milky Way appearing like magic on my camera’s LCD screen when there is nothing there for my naked eyes to see other than a smattering of stars, and by the sheer enormity of the Universe that is intriguingly dark and engulfing to my sense of place in reality. While my day is typically flooded with superficialities and domesticities, at night alone in nature the black void surrounding me elevates my senses to hyperawareness and raises my consciousness into being. Maybe it’s just evolutionary instinct kicking in, imagining unseen predators lurking in the shadows, or maybe it’s the clumsy fumbling in the dark trying to operate machinery without error or maybe both. Or maybe, if quantum mechanics is to be believed, it’s the realization that I\’ve come full circle while standing there in awe of a Universe whose vastness my mind cannot comprehend and that is something my mind helps create. With quantum mechanics, the proposition, \”I think therefore I am\”, becomes true only to a point because the “I” is not just the “am” anymore but is also creator–or co-creator among the multitude other I’s–of the Universe in which the “I” does its thinking.