The blackened sky with its sea of stars drapes majestically overhead.  I see in it a cloak of twilight both delicately vast and enormously subtle.  Life and death take form in all corners of this tapestry, yet we occupy but one tiny speck of dust upon its face.

Then I count endless mountains that struggle to reach the heavens.  They can never know what rests beyond the realms they occupy, kingdoms of land built and destroyed by forces so powerful yet gentle as to lift skyward in eons more earth than humanity has ever moved.  I see their stoic forms held high above the plains, and I ponder.

Brushed against my cheek comes the wind, always shaping, always moving, always touching without being touched.  It brings with it warmth and cold with nary a concern.  To be as free as a summer breeze or as chilling as a winter gale…  I cannot help but be moved in light of such constant migration, such powerful strength.

And with each glance to and fro comes yet another discovery, another glimpse of nature’s countless wonders and unending strength.  What little we see here, we who live on this miniscule blue sphere dangling precariously in the hands of such a feeble tribe as humans.  Yet across distances unimaginable we find hope, if not for ourselves then for the cosmos, because what horrendous disasters we can visit upon our own world hardly threaten what remains in that which the universe holds gently, that which rests in ageless, infinite hands.

Perhaps the memory of us will be nothing more than a blink in cosmic eyes.  Perhaps the totality of what we continue destroying here means little in our own galaxy, let alone the depths of space that lie beyond it.  I nevertheless cannot help but wonder… and lament.  Such beauty rests within the confines of our planet.  Why then do we toss it all away?

So we dance upon this minute bauble traveling in the midst of a nondescript solar system, and we claim authority over that which we do not own, even as we fly our little lives amongst mundane planets.  Our world goes dark in silent whispers unheard by the nearest star, yet we destroy that which we did not create and which must sustain us and our kith and kin—for time foreseeable.

Do we not weep for what we do?  Or are we too blind in our selfish ambition to realize the horrors we perpetrate in the name of superiority?

I know not of this human compulsion to kill and maim.  I know not of this heartless rending of Earth in the name of progress, driven forth by greed and want.

I know only that the beauty that surrounds me disappears all too quickly, that we alone must take a stand to protect home and hearth, and that self-importance and indiscriminate desire serve no purpose other than to take from ourselves and our descendants that which can never be regained.

And so I look upon distant worlds as they waltz about distant stars, all with no care for our self-proclaimed dominance, and I hope inhabitants of those other places have grown more mature than my brethren.  Likewise, I hope they protected what could never be replaced if lost.

For we obviously have no intention of doing so.