I stare up in amazement.

Out here, the stars twinkle more brightly than they do at home. 

Tiny pinpricks of light are dancing against a background of the richest navy-black hue that deserves a better name than “midnight blue,” which sounds more like the paint color of an Oldsmobile Cutlass circa 1986.

I see only a portion of the sky, a chunk that reminds me of a piece of rectangle school pizza. It is bordered on the left and the right by the eaves of the porch. On the left, a log beam at least a foot in diameter extends from the top of the overhang down to the second level, where I lounge in a hammock, and it continues to the ground level below. 

How did the builders set that enormous log? It would have taken a crane or some other large piece of equipment to secure it in that vertical position, along with its twin farther down the porch, which is not currently in my line of sight.

I am centered between the two eaves, so my view of the sky is also limited. The horizon is a treeline with three evenly spaced rises, which are covered this time of year with the thick, green foliage of deciduous trees. In the fall, it will blaze with yellows, reds, and oranges before the trees turn loose of their leaves, leaving the landscape all gray and brown, the color of a wild turkey hen.

But at night, no matter the time of the year, the land is pitch black, and the light from some distant city glows cobalt against the edge of the timberline.

I see no moon. There are only the glimmering stars, the singing of the katydids, and the occasional croak of a bullfrog at the trout pond at the bottom of the hill.

My father was the one who told me to look up when I was a child. In our front yard, on a hilltop with few trees and artificial light to obscure the view, we saw more than just a piece of the night sky. The feathery arm of the Milky Way streaked across the wide expanse of the heavens, with all its millions of stars blurring together in one great amorphous band.

That I live on a globe of rock and water and life in the middle of all that space has always made me feel funny. It is here that I lose my words, as often happens when humanity is faced with something so much larger than ourselves. Yet the vastness doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable, nor does it make me feel especially small. 

But it did make me want to learn more about the night sky, visible only when the earth turns away from the sun. A flashback: in the third grade, a demonstration of rotation, when one classmate stood stock still, playing the sun, and the second classmate had the dizzying task of performing both the earth’s daily rotation and yearly revolution.

Flash forward: in college, I was required to take three science courses.

Chemistry was a breeze, having been prepared by a high school teacher who made balancing equations and stoichiometry as easy as making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Biology was an entertainment. My biology lab was full of sorority girls who didn’t want to touch the formaldehyde-soaked specimens. There again, my high school teacher had led my class through the dissection of ten different animals, beginning with an earthworm and ending with a fetal pig.

For my required college physical science course, geology or physics would have sufficed, but I wanted to learn about the phases of the moon and the names of the constellations.

I signed up for astronomy.

I should have read the course description.

My professor at the University of Alabama was Dr. William Keel, whose lively lectures and discussions reminded me of my “first love,” that of the wonder of space, while I struggled to comprehend the mathematical formulas and the physics behind it all. The labs weren’t much better, as we were focused on the math that supported the science, and the graduate student in charge had all the personality of a piece of white bread. 

But I stuck with that class. I’m proud to say I made a B in the class and an A in the lab. Sadly, we did very little with the moon, and we did nothing with the constellations. 

I can identify the Big Dipper, and sometimes I can pick out Orion’s Belt, the same as I did as a child.

Yet there was a lesson learned in Dr. Keel’s class. His warm and inviting personality led students to ask him a variety of questions. During one class, a student asked him if he believed in God.

Dr. Keel’s response went something like this: “Yes. When you study astronomy, and you see the order and the organization behind it all, how can you not believe? The universe did not just happen.”

Dr. Keel was also one of a group of professors who sponsored a full-page advertisement in The Crimson White, the campus newspaper, in support of a belief in God. 

I still don’t know the constellations. I don’t know much about the moon. I sure don’t know the math behind it all. 

But when I look up at a piece of the night sky, I know that I don’t care about the specifics of any of that anymore. 

It’s not about understanding it all.

It’s about looking up. And it is more than okay that our view is limited, for it is better that way.

But I will always wonder how the Builder did it: the stars, the galaxies, the black holes, the quasars, the planets, the Earth, the trees, the rocks, my flesh, my fingertips, my soul.

Altogether, a universe.

And I am amazed.