Looking Up

Tonight I went outside

and did something I rarely do these days.

I looked up at the sky

instead of at a computer screen

or a stack of papers.

I was simply

still

not rushing through my "to do" list

or workingworkingworking

or worryingworryingworrying.

In silence, in stillness,

in the midst of everydayness --

take time to wonder.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;	5
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. -- Walt Whitman