I was driving home tonight when I happened to look up and catch sight of the moon. It was blindingly white, illuminating the clusters of small clouds that clung to each other like puffs of warm breath in the cold winter air. I was awestruck. Not because of the moon’s intense beauty, which was incredible, but because I had forgotten how vast the sky can seem sometimes. How when you look up, it feels like you’re drowning in its hugeness. I am so focused on the importance of my daily activities that I have forgotten that sometimes the only way to make it through your day it to look to the sky and find some perspective.

It reminded me of something wonderful I read once about the creation of the world, a page from the novel Ashes and Snow by Gregory Colbert:

“In the beginning of time, the skies were filled with flying elephants. Too heavy for their wings, they sometimes crashed through the trees and frightened other animals.

All the flying grey elephants migrated to the source of Ganges. They agreed to renounce their wings and settle on the earth. When they molted millions of wings fell to the earth, the snow covered them, and the Himalayas were born.

The blue elephants landed in the sea and their wings became fins. They are whales, the trunkless elephants of the ocean. Their cousins are the manatees, the trunkless elephants of the rivers.

The chameleon elephants kept their wings but agreed never again to land on earth. They change the colors of their feathers every day. Today they are azure, and when it rains they are the color of pearls.

When they go to sleep, the chameleon elephants always lie down in the same place in the sky and dream with one eye open. The stars you see at night are the unblinking eyes of sleeping elephants, who sleep with one eye open to best keep watch over us.”

I like to think of life this way, with elephants in the sky and in the waters; a mystical, secret way in which we are not alone. Go outside tonight and look up at the stars. Tell me if you see the eye of an elephant looking back at you.