Love in the Stars

The Chilean desert is one of the best places in the world to view the stars. From there you can see not only the rings of Saturn (using a good telescope), but also Andromeda - the galaxy closest to the Milky Way. This is only possible in the Southern Hemisphere.
    Viewing these spaces, you contemplate the hundreds of billions of stars that make up each galaxy, and our infinitesimal place within the universe. ‘Really, we are nothing’ said my guide to the local landscape the Lunar Valley, ‘Maybe as a whole, as the human race we are something; but as individuals we do not amount to much.’
    His comments related both to the stars and to the hundreds of millions of years it took to forge the grand rock formations that were the subject of his tour. Everything about this region suggests a scale that surpasses human understanding. ‘To the Andean people who lived here before the Spaniards came, this landscape was not very important, it was just where they lived.’ Here too is scale.
    Five centuries have passed and while the unique cunza language of the former locals has gone (all but a few words, and no understanding of the grammar), a few forms of non-spoken language have persisted. The grandparents still perform rituals that have been going on for centuries. At the beginning of spring, at Pachamama festival, they and their children direct their energies to mother earth so that the earth will work with them for a good harvest (yes there are crops in the region). Yes, from a scientific perspective it is pointless, but from a human perspective it is not without worth - it honors a continuity with their ancestors, and it renews the relationship which each of us has with the ground beneath our feet.
    My guide was complaining that the next generation were watching the same cartoons as everyone else in the world (when I visited the supposedly isolated village of Iruya in Northwest Argentina, a cafe was showing the Simpsons). The rituals were appearing in their textbooks and they showed little interest in keeping with them. The past was becoming another story like the one I have been telling you.
    (TV and the internet are far more stimulating. Why are you reading this?)
    Tourists like myself come away with a different story - did you know that southern Bolivia, northwest Argentina, the Atacama desert are rich with a concentrated diversity of fabulous landscapes? Our eyes feast on the light of the sun as it shimmers across the rainbow-colored mountains, salt lakes, subtropical forests, sand dunes, etc, etc. We want to have our cake and eat it - see the place but also hope that the locals retain their traditions. We embody the millennia-old tension between continuity and advancement.
    Is it an advance that so many people appreciate this landscape in a way the locals did not notice? In New Zealand I was told by many - you get used to it and you don’t notice the beauty anymore. New Zealand is working hard to restore the ecology of its fjord lands and its mountain peaks (a sign on Ben Lomond asked visitors to forcibly tear out any wilding trees that they saw shooting up - they’re a European invader) and also selling jet-fuelled adventures up glaciers (‘It’ll be the highlight of your trip.’) Everywhere, everywhere I travelled I saw this contradiction.
    What you really learn from traveling through five continents in five weeks is:
    a) There’s always more to see.
    b) You’re a tiny fleck in the vast sea of humanity.

But a) and b) are hard to reconcile. The children want more Simpsons, more Spongebob, the elders and the nostalgist visitors want to retain the uniqueness of different locales on our planet. ‘They’re destroying what makes people want to come to their region in the first place’ (one fellow traveller told me about south-east Asia). One traveller to another: ’Did you get to Lombok? I didn’t like Bali either - too crowded with tourists - but Lombok was really something.’ Me, overhearing: ‘Isn’t this happening the world over? The place that was good to visit becomes overrun, like gentrification in the cities’ ‘Yes, and trip advisor is making it worse’ ‘It’s accelerating.’
    Unlike the stars which retain their distance, and are governed by unchangeable laws, we are constantly changing our path, following the feedback loop left by guides and other tourists to improve our experience, and rewriting our story to make it better. We tend to think of our selves as the epicenter of our universe with the lives of others appearing as a constellation around our own.
    For many of us, changes to this constellation are an inherent feature of modern life. Long gone are the days when we lived in a persistent community living out the same rituals and habits year after year, under the same stars.  Instead we tend to anchor our lives in love - the aspiration to form a binary star with another person whose mutual orbit with one’s self will become the stable centre of a family. This will in turn become the basis of future generations.    
    Thus, through love, we become a little bit more than nothing; we become a little bit closer to the permanence of the stars.

It’s important that future generations keep an eye on the stars - that the word does not just degenerate to associations with celebrities and ratings. Though we no longer navigate by the stars, they help us gain perspective on our little place in the universe.