Rocks + Stars

I’ve always found myself in two worlds—one that looks to the sky and one that looks to the ground, one in the future and one in the past.

I’ve collected rocks for as long as I can remember, sparked by an instinctive impulse towards discovery. They are fragments of our steady and ancient Earth, representing a past beyond all memory, and I find it amazing that it is up to us to discover them, and find stories in them. I still recall clearly my excitement to take part in my school’s cross country race held at a fossil-lined shore, and how I placed last in said race because I had filled my pockets with fossils. They are still sitting in a glass on my table, each pebble nearly identical to the other. But they remind me that on a bright cross-country day, I had discovered a painting in each pebble.

My collection fervor was more than just a literal stroll on the beach. I attended rock shows (no, not that kind, I mean actual exhibitions of rocks), and taught myself the chemical makeup and physical properties of the specimens I encountered there. Gradually, my collection changed from “translucent rock” and “dark pebble” into a procession of aragonite, hematite, malachite… But I never stopped collecting pebbles from the ground, for I now understand even clearer the pricelessness of nature’s seemingly random combinations.

Rocks aren’t the only things I collect. For just as long, I’ve collected dandelion fluff. While others despised them, I clutched them close like little pockets of opportunity, a promise for a next year with new tufts of short yellow flowers and puffy seeds. More recently, I began to collect old books. The fragile pages, the heavy scent, perhaps an owner’s name inked in flourish—they soak up time. Like rocks, they connect me to the past, but books offer up a human past.

Though I love the flowers and rocks of our Earth, I also love the cold vastness of space. It is not enough to just collect trinkets of the past when the unknown sky is above me. In “city star parties” with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, I look away from the small bright dots of the surrounding city and towards the small bright dots above. Some lights are a million worlds. Some lights have already flickered out, their demise unbeknownst to us. But I think the best is what I cannot see in a telescope’s field of view—the universe’s beginning and its possible end, black holes that supposedly vanish information, particles so small as to be affected by their observation—all of which I have just begun to explore, either in my independent study project, co-op placement, or online courses. I think that the answers to the most fundamental questions we ask today must be found in the furthest reaches of human science and thought.

When I look up, my mind jumps to find infinity in both time and space, and I find myself shrinking down to a point deep in history, next to my old books and my rocks. After all, space unfolds so slowly—the fifty million years for our Sun to form is as quick as lightning, and when Andromeda lights up our galaxy I’ll have fallen to where Earth’s beginning seems to us now. But this is why I collect these things, and why I want to study Astronomy and Astrophysics. I am finding where I am. My heart is on the Earth and my aspirations have traversed space. I stand at the forefront of time, nostalgic for the past I collect but have never known. I know that I am already a pinprick in the past, but I still want to discover things for the future to know. By remembering the past, I remember myself too, and by watching the sky, I see myself and where I stand, here and now.