What a grand, dare I say, romantic, title. Throughout human history there’ve been odes to lost love, betrayal and grief.

When I sit out in my back garden looking up at the night time sky, I marvel at my small place in this vast universe. Although I live awash in the ambient light of the megalopolis of Los Angeles, many of the stars still glitter and wink. Yet they are but a smattering of the bejeweled super highway that is the Milky Way visible a hundred miles out into the desert southwest. It is there that even the unbeliever can nearly touch the face of God.

When I meditate on my place in this vastness, it becomes ever apparent that the pain of my betrayal, the loss of my marriage and the breaking of my heart are but a blip in the vastness of time. My life experience matters little to anyone but me.

And yet my experience is that of having an entire universe inside me. My universe is as real as the brilliance of the night sky. It reaches as far within me as any outer universe. It is as powerful and full of life as any other experienced by men.

Why are we given these pesky emotions? Why do such seemingly unimportant happenings reach so deep into our soul? Why do we feel, hurt, struggle, rejoice, weep, envy, muse?

Dr Carl Sagan used to say that we are star stuff–the universe looking back at itself. Are we not? Our species has developed over the eons to have these sensory organs, this mind, these feelings to experience some of the vastness of creation. Yet I can not help but wonder why the intensity?

Perhaps it is the yin and yang. One can’t truly know the depths of joy and love if he is not personally, intimately acquainted with pain and loss. Isn’t it the inevitable finality of death that gives intense meaning to our brief time here? Without that finality, surely we would waste even more of our precious irreplaceable time.

Time: the one commodity that can not be begged, borrowed or stolen. We have just so much and no more.

Breathe it in. Revel in the moments of your life for they are indeed numbered.

Yes, even the stars weep at the fragility of life, the brevity, the wonder, the unimaginable depth of what awaits us all…our life force, our personal energy that is never extinguished. We but change forms into what and where, we do not know.

Explore, marvel, wonder, imagine, enjoy, reap, sow, bless, take, give, celebrate, grieve. It’s all part of what it means to be human, here and now.