Night Sky

It is 114am. I am awake in the peace and quiet of the night. God woke me up. I want to write but I do not know what to write about. I look through the window and look at the night sky. It is cloudy. Maybe rain is on its way. How many stars are in the sky? There must be a lot. The universe seems big because we are small relative to the universe. I was Googling for "srars" because I thought it would be cool if "stars" was a palindrome. This led me to a photographer's page and a photograph of the stars in the night sky and reminded me of my love for photography. I just realised that the words thing and night share the same exact letters.

I was looking at the etymology of sky and learnt from my friend Chatty that "sky" used to be "heaven", linguistically speaking, in everyday English. But once heaven took on a more spiritual or theological meaning, a new, more neutral word was needed for the physical sky we see above us. Enter sky, borrowed from Norse and gradually replacing heaven in that more earthly context. I look through the window again and all the clouds are gone now. I see a beautifully dark blue and clear sky. According to the etymology of sky, the meaning shifted from "cloud" to the broader sense of "the upper atmosphere" or "the heavens" to what we now think of as the sky.

I closed my eyes and selected a random verse from the Quran app. I got surah 54 verse 53 which translates as "Every matter, small and large, is written precisely". Surah 54 is titled "the moon". Before this I was actually thinking about going outside to look for and photograph the moon. The next verse, 54, translates "Indeed, the righteous will be amid Gardens and rivers (of paradise)". I did go outside and was greeted by the neighhood cat we call Boysie which is really a girl. The moon is big and bright tonight. I did not get a good photo of the moon. I would stay outside longer but there are bats flying about. My decision to write tonight turned into a small adventure of sorts.