Today was so long I can hardly remember when it started. Back in the fog of memory it seems like it was going to be a bad day, and I think it was for a while. Something about a chemistry exam going badly... a long day up the hill with a lab... I don't know. By the time I reached my room again in the late afternoon I was exhausted. It sounds like a normal day, really, when you look at it.

But something happened, and I don't know what, but I had dinner and I resisted the urge to nap and I climbed the hill to take a sunset alignment again, witnessing that miracle moment when day turns the reins over to night. I survived an annoying meeting. (Sounds just like any night.) On my way up the hill again to do work I saw a spiderweb on a bluelight phone and vowed to come back later with my camera. Then, working on astronomy with a translucent celestial globe in a wooden frame, possibly one of the most beautiful objects I have seen -- a study break with my roommate to get a snack -- all the while I am alert, alive, and Coldplay's "Clocks" plays in the back of my head (the piano bit in that is one of the most simultaneously invigorating and peaceful things I can think of). I go down the hill, fetch my bike and camera, and return to the spiderweb. Biking feels like flying. All of a sudden it is 1:30 in the morning and I don't know how it happened or why I am not tired or why all these little things are making me feel as though I were seeing beauty for the first time.

Now that I've written it down it sounds so mundane. What really happened today that was different from any other day? I wish I knew. It was just one of those days where at times everything fits together, beautiful and intertwined, like instruments in a song. All I want is to figure out how to live this way every day of my life.

I was trying to find a way to celebrate the first really angst-free evening for quite some time when a friend suggested that I go look at the stars because they were really nice tonight. So despite the chill in the air I went out walking. Down on Broad St. there was hardly a star to be seen, just yellowy streetlights blocking the sky. But I thought maybe if I just kept climbing the hill -- a little farther from the lights -- a little closer to the sky...

The lights thinned out, and turned from yellowy to white, as I climbed more and more stairs and slopes on the twisting paths up the hill. Still there wasn't much to be seen. I stood under the one last light before the old golf course looking at the bleak sky, thinking maybe she was wrong, maybe it's cloudy, there doesn't seem to be much to see for all that -- and as I thought stepped away from the last light onto the grass and there suddenly not little by little but all at once my eyes adjusted and I saw every star in the sky laid out before me, brilliantly, as though it were a star chart or planetarium, not the beautiful but fickle and imperfect sky itself. I kept climbing, ignoring the cold and my wet shoes, and thinking only of the endless light pouring forth from the sky. No moon, just stars upon stars all so bright that I couldn't figure out which belonged to constellations and which didn't.

When I got back to my room my ears were ringing for some reason. I can only guess that the stars had been singing to me up on the old golf course.