Star Light by Kim Wiggins

Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars.  Captive now upon the earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows. – Gerard de Nerval

Original Illustration by ObviousState on Etsy

The Universe Posters by Amanda Mocci 

(via theantidote)

Does progress mean that we dissolve our ancient myths? If we forget our legends, I fear that we shall close an important door to the imagination. — James Christensen

The Keeper by Shannon Rankin (selflesh) on Etsy 

In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe: therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe. — David Bohm

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

“Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?”

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

— Hart Crane  (via i12bent)

There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmonid knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… . The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up. — Jerry Waxman, Astronomical Tidbits  

(via bustedboobies)

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. – John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911

(via crashinglybeautiful)

Stars from a wall painting in Tomb of Karakhamun at Qurnet Murai, Egypt circa 700BC

Ancient stars in their death throes spat out atoms like iron which this universe had never known. … Now the iron of old nova coughings vivifies the redness of our blood. 

— Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st century (2003)