“There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmon knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens. The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I am six in my first memory of that sense of longing for the stars, the pull of belonging to the stars. Dad is driving us to Queensland to visit my grandparents and I am lying on a mattress in the back of the station wagon as the car winds its way northwards along the single lane highway. It is one, maybe two in the morning, and instead of sleeping, I am staring out the back window, the sensation that my home is somewhere out there rushing through my veins. And of course it’s in my blood; the very iron in my body was created in those stars.

The first birthday present G gave me was a night at the Sydney Observatory. It was September 2014 and he’d booked the place just for us with our own private astronomer to give us a tour of the Universe. One of the things we saw that night was Saturn, in all her ringed beauty.

So it’s only fitting, that it is Sleeping at Last’s “Saturn”, that reminds us…

How rare and beautiful it truly is that we exist