August 11 - August 15 Stars and Sky

2010-The Perseid Meteor showers are August 12.  The fact that they fall on the same calendar day every year(within a day) seems to indicate something right about the way we mark time.  The days have begun to shorten by two and even three minutes and as we plummet towards fall the image of a pendulum comes to mind.  The low point is the fall equinox and then the pendulum sweeps through going upwards, gradually slowing down until it pauses at its high point, the winter solstice and then reverses direction, gaining speed again through the spring and then pausing at the alternate high point of summer.  Gravity becomes the force that prevents our living in either eternal winter or endless summer. These two images of time, the pendulum and the circling of my other essay together create a complexity that could not be more different than the straight linear movement usually conceived.   If I could mentally grasp the shape of a pendulum imposed over a spiral I think I would have the picture of time as it appears in four dimensions.
2012-A window opened in the cloudy night sky and I saw five meteors in about half an hour. One was spectacular-big and bright and trailing long. It left a red afterimage in my eyes.
2013-I woke up at 3 last night and was trying to decide whether to get up and go to the bathroom or just go back to sleep when I remembered that I wanted to see the meteors. A crisp hazeless, moonless night in mid-August is not that common and I was rewarded with the sixty or so promised each hour. Most were very short and many were faint and of course they always seem to appear where you’re not looking, at the periphery of your vision. But there were a handful of long bright ones leaving lasting images. What struck me most though was recognizing how speeded up even my intentionally slowed down and simplified life is compared with an activity like just lying there watching the sky. (Do people even do that anymore?) I was thinking that if you didn’t know better, you could believe the sky was a flat lid over us and the stars pinholes in that solid sheet letting the light from the ‘room’ beyond leak in. Then someone could teach you what people now believe is the reality and while your eyes would perceive exactly the same picture, your understanding would have completely  opened. That is what it must be like to shift into seeing four dimensions