Gazing into the eyes of eternity, I behold infinity...stars...tens...hundreds...thousands...millions...countless glistening dewdrops on the seamless pentacle of infinite space...spawning, living, dying over an over in the eternal time warp...star dust to star dust...star ash to star ash.

Everytime, when I first raise my eyes skywards to soak in the magic of the night sky, I see all the familiar stars...those which make up the Orion or the Big Bear (depending on the time of the year) and the planets...Mercury or Venus (depending on the time of the night)...and I am tempted to shrug my shoulders and say,"Huh! So what's new out there?" Then just when I am about to turn my eyeballs backs to the daily chores of mundane existence, a teeny-weeny sparkle in the sky catches my eye, which I had missed before...so there I am squinting hard at it to make sure if it's for real or not when I see another one! Oops! There's another I'd missed...and one there...and another here...and there...and there too...here, here...right over the tip of my nose...how could I have possibly missed that!

And so the night sky never ceases to fascinate...what with the stars playing hide seek and streaks of light flashing across it which turn out to be shooting stars rather than aeroplanes if I am really lucky.

The moon of course, is not to be forgotten...white, chaste, virginal, calm, soothing...so much nearer than the stars, yet distant and aloof in its own way...the lonely sentinel- alone in a crowd, perhaps by choice, perhaps by fate. When full and rotund he peeps at me from between the leaves of a tree, flooding my room with his light...and something more, casting mysterious shadows on the walls- takes my breath away. To look at that waxing and waning crescent is like seeing myself change...on the inside.

The clouds are loved best when they play hide and seek with the moon...chasing him across the skies- hide- seek, seek- hide. Like flamboyant stokes of paint on a shimmering canvas...sometimes rain laden orange...sometimes cotton like plain white.

The sky...heaven...space...cosmos...call it what you may...so dark, so solemn, so powerful, so empty...brought to life by this puppet show of stars, the planets, the moon, other moons, shooting stars, clouds...extra terrestrial life, eh? It is the womb of creation- where the first birth took place and so will the last death...where Eternity and Infinity walk hand in hand...as one day each one of us will...Amen!