closer to me than my skin

Not very long ago, I went on a holiday with one of the nicest people I know. While I have my share of short sighted, irritating, inconsiderate, stubborn people in the world; it has been an absolute pleasure to be around some very wise and wonderfully generous people. It is wonderful to look at them and realise that this thing can be done.

We went on to do the Pinnacles Hike in Malaysia, and stayed at Camp 5 (This guy does a good description of it - except that we are better food. I particularly remember a stir-fry made with the freshest, most organic wild bamboo from the wild.) For one reason (it was cold and I wasn't prepared) or another (the animals are unbelievably noisy at night), I was up and about a few hours before dawn.

This is when I experienced the awe inspiring sky that I could ever believe possible. With the background of the incredibly loud animals and insects, the water rushing down the river AND a group of hikers preparing to leave quite active like a colony of ants - I looked at the sky and saw an unbelievably bright night sky simply covered with stars.

I looked at it and thought about all these people who had lived before electricity became so pervasive, and how they saw would have seen the sky - and suddenly the story of the three wise men following the star, and people navigating using the night sky and when they must have been building those amazing structures in Egypt and India and the rest of it gained a bit more meaning, context. I looked at it and thought how I have lived under them all my life, and I have never seen them, and how they will completely disappear once the sun starts to shine - and I thought of all the various very permanent and completely invisible things in my life.

Usually when I see something like this, I feel like I have something of great significance before me if only I had the eyes to see it but this time, for once, I felt like I did understand, that more things make more sense than they did before; that I wasn't trying to hold on to something that was escaping me but that I was recognising something I have always had, always will.