Hehehe. I'm not very appreciative of what I have. I sometimes want to see the northern star though.

The problem with the Southern Cross is it's an easy pattern to find just about anywhere in the sky, if you look hard enough - so a common conversation amongst my friends while drunk goes along the lines of "No that's the Southern Cross! No that is! NO THAT ONE IS!"

The Pole star is nothing special- a faint star that happens to be in the right place. You draw a line upwards from the front two stars of the Plough and eventually you hit it.

My favourite constellation is Orion. But you guys get to see that too, don'tcha? Only t'other way up!

Yeah, we get Orion (I'm never sure where it is though - it's another one ppl try to find when drunk).

Three stars in a (more or less) straight line. That's Orion's "belt". It's the object by which I get my bearings. Trouble is it's only visible here during the winter months. I miss it when it's gone.

i love to lie on the beach up at the cottage, at night. There are so many more stars visible than at home, it's so beautiful...

I try to ignore the crawly things that are also on the beach at night. And one thing I CAN find in the sky is Orion's belt.

Here we suffer from being at the edge of a brightly-lit metropolis and the skies are never really dark.

I remember lying on a hillside in the south of France, far from anywhere, on a perfectly clear night, about thirty years ago. O, but the stars were wonderful.

I saw a lunar eclipse (?) - where the earth passes between the sun and the moon - once, from the beach. It was very exciting, there was just a bit of a breeze so the lake was ruffled but not rough, and yes, lots of wonderful stars.

When I am old, I mean really old, I hope I can remember what it was like to look up and see all those stars.

It must be really nice to have a nearby beach to go and lie on.

Orion is my favorite, too. Oooooo, and yesterday morning, I saw a falling star!

Most other constellations are hard to make out, but Orion has such force of character!

It's true. I am looking for new stars to steer by. Thanks for the interpretation.

Whoa, now that's a pretty neat relation! I don't think I ever have dreams like that. Most of mine are sort of silly and pointless, but there are some exceptions.

I don't often bother to remember them, but these two were forceful and insisted I did.

A interesting dream! Isn't that odd? How you anticipated the icon?

I had a dream last night that confused me: I woke up in Heaven, and it was a room, with chairs. My brother was there, but he was a Roman Catholic, and I suddenly realized I was in Catholic Heaven! That there were different rooms for all the different religions.

Of course, the Pope and his last week has been much on my mind. I have found myself admiring his life more than I could have expected, since I didn't agree with his conservative views and thought them reactionary and antiquated; but learning more about him, I have found myself wistfully wishing for that sort of relationship with God--with Jesus, with Mary--that he had all his life.

I guess he's not stuck in a waiting room being surprised.

Oh, dear.

Did you ever read Dunne's Experiment with Time? He argued- from his own experience- that we dream as much of the future as of the past. He then went on to show (using mathematics I couldn't begin to understand) that we live in a multi-layered "serial" universe.

I have complicated feeling about the Pope. On the one hand I think it insufferable that one unelected old man should think he has the right to impose his rigid, pre-modern morality on the rest of us, but on the other I admire this particular Pope's remarkable strength of character.