Leave it to Lebanon’s growing pains to get me writing again. I’ve been so wrapped up in other media and projects that my fingertips haven’t been still long enough to weave a coherent paragraph of word strings.

Last night, I went to the stars. I needed to be off the grid to get back on it, to reposition myself, to be aware that my time on this third rock from the sun is finite and, ultimately, negligible. Marcus Aurelius said, “what we do now echoes in eternity” and getting lost in a snapshot of the universe will remind you that you are a blip on the timeline of this planet, the planet that is slowly dying because no one feels like their choices have any impact. We want fewer motorcycles on the road but we want shawarma delivered to our doorstep at midnight. We want freedom of speech but we want to silence music or mask art that are reflections on and of our societal structures.

Khalil Azar, the cognoscenti of the astroadventurer group, BeirutVersus, mapped out where we were in relation to our geolocation and the summer season. A concept that stuck with me from his intro was that of Jupiter and its 3 moons. Gravitationally bound to one another, the system stabilizes as they resonate in space. In the sea of the Milky Way that flows out of the teapot asterism across the sky of Kfardebian, that glimmer of cosmic kinship was solacing.

The thought of entities orbiting harmoniously in vast darkness is the way we keep spinning and allowing for life to persist. We each have our own moons keeping us stabilized in a world that is geared to always veer into chaos. The second law of thermodynamics roughly dictates that we are not supposed to stabilize, that there is a constant loss of energy available to do work, that entropy will only increase as we continue to exist. No wonder the loss of a moon can throw you into a tailspin.

 

 

As Khalil continued to break down the stars with Arabic names, including the three that make up the Summer Triangle star formation, we quickly saw how influential our part of the world was in celestial documentation. Vega, one of the vertices of this triangle, is a loose transliteration of wāqi which means “falling” or “landing.”

A fellow stargazer then said, “Wein kinna w wein sirna.” *
“We’re still here,“ I said.

And yet, with the youth being shipped out in droves, their bags being packed by their own parents who shove them out the door, the collective attention being sidetracked because of a meme or a lyric while the country is Vega, falling further into decay – are we still here at all? The sky is the most basic record of the past and it could be that we’ve all but vanished to the eyes of beings across the galaxy. All this light is seen from a distance even though we’re long gone. It feels like this place is a sky full of ghosts.

 

*A phrase that means, where we were versus where we are now