Of Stars and the Sea
Marbella, April 2025
The American writer John Steinbeck named his celebrated novel Of Mice and Men after a Robert Burns poetry verse “the best laid plans of mice and men, often go awry.” Steinbeck teaches us that even the most meticulously designed plans are susceptible to being disrupted by unforeseen circumstances. I find myself thinking of this novel after spending a week traversing the passages bordering the Mediterranean Sea in the south of Spain and Portugal. The entire journey along the Sea gave sight to an impressively wide expanse of the sky and its stars, and like Steinbeck predicted of most journeys, this one, too, brought unexpected twists. A journey not of mice and men, but of stars and the sea.
At one point of the journey, I found myself gazing out from the tip of Europe to see North Africa in the far-off distance. One of those extraordinary sights that makes one realize just how small of a blip we are in the midst of this marvelous universe. Many scientists believe this marvelous universe itself began from a singular point of matter and energy, from which the cosmos rapidly expanded and stretched over the course of more than 13 billion years. Furthering the analysis on energy, the law of conservation of energy tells us that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Meaning - in all this time, and for all of time - we have not lost or gained anything. What shall be, will unravel from what has already been.
The universe is a panorama infinitely rearranging itself, just like our own beings are a reconfiguration and evolution of who we once were. As English Journalist Caitlin Moran wrote in The Sunday Times, “The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion times over. Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms. When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honor of being alive.”
That there is an entire universe within just one molecule of us, with elements of both darkness and light. The Mediterranean Sea I travel around is cloaked by stars watching over the sea. I find the sea much more fascinating at night, when it is enveloped by darkness. I am just as fascinated by darkness as a concept. The darkness that descends after dusk. The darkness that separates the stars. The darkness of the 98% of our DNA that was dark matter too nebulous to be coded.
The darkness that is the space between words unspoken.
The darkness between rational and irrational fears, because they are fears nonetheless.
Darkness can be disarming to navigate - without the light, it is difficult to walk in the shadows. The true reckoning comes when, on rare occasions, we are able to recognize the darkness in another, and they our own. A “there you are, I have been expecting you.” Seeing through the darkness while planting torches in the shadows.
An alignment of those spaces between words and fears. The quiet understandings. The intrinsic knowings. Recognizing the other, even when they have difficulty recognizing themselves. Embracing all parts, dark and light, because there also exists divinity in the darkness. To quote from the Quran, “We adorned the lowest heavens with Stars.” The beauty of a cloaked night.
That in infinite galaxies and constellations, infinite seas and stars, we still meet. The thread of destiny weaving in and out, stitched into each other’s story, just waiting for the eventual collision that was written into the stitching of both fabrics. The alignment that twice came back around, despite being times and worlds and atoms apart. In the quiet. In the chaos. Impossible for a pen to capture what the universe took its time to write.
