I was frustrated. I felt as though I had finally begun on a path of rekindling the dreams of my childhood through seeking the awes of my past, only to be blocked by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. How was I to use the soft glow of the Milky Way to illuminate the depths of myself when I couldn’t leave the city, let alone my own home? Light pollution from the largest city in Canada had snuffed out my ability to see the stars, stifling the dreams of astrophotography I had rediscovered in Africa.
I tried to mentally send myself back in time to reexperience the awe I had felt under the dark skies by editing my photos from Africa, but it didn’t bring about the depth of awe I recalled in my dreams. Something was missing, but what?
After months of lockdown and multiple waves of the pandemic, the weather was finally nice enough to emerge from isolation and journey to a local park with my partner and a friend. I decided to use this opportunity to take a timelapse of the CN tower from a different perspective than I was used to, creating a memory of our hangout and long-awaited freedom.
Partway through the timelapse, I noticed a bright light flickering through the trees above me. Curious, I took a step back, out from the shade of the tree I was under, to find an almost full moon shining down on me.
Like a lightbulb in my mind, I was hit with a flash of inspiration, sparking the sense of awe I had been looking for during these dark and isolated months. The moonlight showed me a path to my past, sending me back in time to my childhood dreams.
I remembered looking at my lunar phase chart beside my bed each night and using it to identify the phase of the moon in the sky above me. As a child, I was always in awe of how the moon appeared to follow me around each evening, guiding me through the darkness of the night in an everchanging, yet cyclic pattern of light and renewal.
Thinking back to my time in Africa and how the vastness of our galaxy awed me to my core, I realized that all was not lost. I could still shoot astrophotography and pursue my dreams; I just needed to begin again and look a little closer to home.
