That moment the sky caught fire

One night in the Amazon, I saw a meteor cross the sky.

I was walking through the forest when I came across two young students from a group I was accompanying. A boy and a girl. They were lying together beneath the stars, long after everyone else had gone to sleep.

I decided I should probably stay with them for a while. Just to make sure they weren’t getting up to anything they shouldn’t.

So I lay down too.

We talked quietly about life in the Amazon, and looked up through a gap in the tall canopy at the stars beyond.

And then, without warning, the sky caught fire.

A great ball of light streaked above us, blazing across that small window of darkness between the trees.

For a moment, none of us spoke.

Then we all gasped.

It was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared.

But I remember the feeling it left behind.

Things like that seemed to happen in the Amazon.

Moments when the ordinary world would suddenly open, and something almost impossible would pass through.

Perhaps there was no magic to it. A meteor crossed the atmosphere. Three people happened to be looking up.

But perhaps that is the magic.

To be there.

To be paying attention.

To find yourself, for a few seconds, beneath an ancient forest and an unimaginably old sky, and remember that you belong to both.

People have spent centuries imagining Eden as somewhere lost.

But sometimes I wonder if it was never lost at all.

Perhaps we simply stopped looking.

Because there are still places where life exists in such abundance, complexity and beauty that the boundary between the ordinary and the miraculous becomes very thin.

Places that ask almost nothing of us.

Except that we enter quietly.

That we listen.

And that, every now and then,

we look up.