It was cloudy tonight, but even had it been clear I doubt we could have made out the "Great Conjunction": too much ambient city light. So this might be sour grapes. But what's the big deal? Jupiter and Saturn were nowhere near each other, just appeared so from our vantage point. We gave up thinking the earth the center of the universe years ago, even before the last time these two appeared so close in the earth sky!
I made do with internet sightings, an image on twitter apparently taken in Tampa (with several moons!!), and the google doodle showing us what we wanted to see. Various live streams disappointed, even more than watching the solar eclipse that way. It's clear that for those who did see it, it was a tiny part of the sky - though it conjured the depth, and the closeness, of space in a powerful way. Every constellation hides the depth of space and time behind the shape we project on to it. Deep!
But rather than peevish I feel unmoored in a nice way by all this. Constellations, conjunctions and eclipses are in the eye of the beholder - from no other vantage point would they appear. Other celestial observers, if any there are, see other plays of shape and depth. This doesn't make us significant or insignificant but connects us to every other vantage in the universe, each of which has its Great Conjunctions, whether anyone's there to notice or not. It's like the thought I've had on seeing reflections of sun or moon seem to stretch across water to me. What I'm seeing isn't an illusion, but the wonder is what I'm not able to see - the same phenomenon embracing a myriad other points of view. Same and different. The discovery is being and moving in space - the same space - with all these others, potential and actual. (The poignancy of that insight has something to do with the fleetingness of all conjunctions, and with those other vantage points not being occupied, and with how, even if they were, none of us can perceive the beauty seeking out the other... but those are topics for another day.)
All conjunctions are great! The nicest articulation of this experience came in Tyson Yunkaporta's account of the way the Rainbow Serpent appears to us. I've quoted it before, but here it is again.
When
us-two see that arc in the sky, that Rainbow Serpent, we are seeing
only one part of it, and it is subjective: just for us. If we move, the
rainbow also moves, only appearing in relation to our standpoint. If you
go to the next hill you will see it in a different position from where I
am seeing it. The moon sisters were trapped by a similar phenomenon,
chasing the reflected moon on the surface of the night sky, thinking it
was a fish they could spear. But like the rainbow that image moves in
relation to where you are sitting, so they could never catch it. Now you
can see their shadows in the moon where they remain trapped to this
day, a warning to all about the illusion of chasing fixed viewpoints.
The
Serpent loves the water because that is what allows us to see him, and
he communicates with each of us this way, but he is not just an entity
of water. He is an entity of light. The part we are seeing there in the
wet sky, or in the fine spray coming off the front of a speeding dinghy,
is just a line across the edge of a sphere. The line moves across
multiple spheres that are infinitely overlapping, spiraling inwards and
outwards, extending everywhere that light can go (or has gone or will
go), and the Rainbow Serpent moves through this photo-fabric of
creation. He goes under the ground too, because light has been there in
the past and he is not limited by linear time.
Ah,
but is he a wave or a particle? I guess that depends on how you’re
looking at him, but we could see him as a wave, a snake, because he is
constantly in motion across systems that are constantly in motion and
interwoven throughout everything that is, was and will be.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, 54-55
Every conjunction is a twinkle in the Rainbow Serpent's eye.
