The puppy is growing up. She’s seven months old as I write this, and her shackles of timidity are finally being thrown off. We walk at night and she doesn’t shrink in fear at every trash barrel or shadow. It offers this star gazer the chance to dance with the constellations once again without alarming the neighbors. The odd neighbor walking the streets in the dark isn’t so very strange when he’s walking his dog. The dog is learning that this is our time together, but my head is often tilted upwards while her nose is down. We assure full coverage I suppose; the two of us walking with noses pointed in different directions.

The pup has learned that I’m a sky spirit, temporarily grounded in this lifetime of servitude to the nest. Do I want to fly? Don’t you?? To fly is to soar! You bet I want to fly. I steal envious glances at the hawks and osprey gliding overhead. I marvel at the flocks of geese in formation. If they can do it why can’t we?! Alas, it’s not in our genes to flap our wings and soar. And yet we’ve learned how to fly anyway. How audacious of us.

My favorite videos are flying videos. Give me drone footage over the perspective from the ground any day. There’s wonder in soaring above it all, and I’m immediately drawn into the world from the vantage point of a fellow spirit. That we are grounded doesn’t mean we can’t soar. There are opportunities all around us should we look for them.

And there are people in my life who are kindred sky spirits. We don’t see each other often enough, but when the sky offers magic, we conspiratorially and usually virtually nod upwards—did you see that? Yes. Yes I did. And noted: so did you friend. Almost a shared secret hiding in plain sight, the sky. The masses are like the puppy: noses down. They’re looking at their phones or god knows what while the kindred glance upward, finding magic all around.

Some of us instinctively know the phase of the moon, or which planets are visible at any given moment. We keep an eye on the possibility of an aurora and curse the inevitable cloud cover that occurs at seemingly every meteor shower or Northern Lights display. Not for us, not this time. We grow weary of such self-talk and scheme trips to faraway places where the weather seems to follow us mockingly. Some things aren’t meant to be, but we keep looking anyway.

There’s no doubt the world is full of ugliness and misery if you look for it. Most of that resides in the world of humans, right at ground-level. We are forced to confront the worst in us on a regular basis. And yet there’s also wonder and magic in the world, just waiting for us to look up and find it. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to look beyond the broken surface and learn to soar above it?