Confession with the Universe

Featured in 'A Christmas gift: Stories of the quest for connection'
By Washington Post Staff Arelis R. Hernández
December 23, 2020

The Earth was a map of miseries in 2020. A boiling planet, burning homes, a pandemic that shuttered businesses, leaving people jobless, hungry, anxious, isolated.

But if the world feels like it’s creeping nearer to apocalypse, Richard Acosta suggests, look up.

Acosta’s life, like that of most Americans, was arrested this year. Stuck at home, he was starved for an adventure — socially distanced, of course. When Texas’s travel promotion agency put out a list of the state’s seven darkest places to stargaze, the chance to see the Milky Way again in the vast emptiness of the West Texas night sky seemed like the perfect pandemic activity for a photographer. It was a chance to connect to the cosmos, to see the sublime.

Four years earlier, Acosta’s heart was breaking when a friend invited him into the wilderness near Big Bend National Park. Acosta’s marriage was over. He had grinded to the top of a career in local television, but he hated it. After nearly two decades, he quit. His trajectory turned downward. He was listless, exhausted. He was angry, overwhelmed, uncertain of everything apart from his own sense of impending doom.

Then he looked up. A purplish-gold, hazy band of big bright lights, dust and gas streaked across the sky, sending a surge of something strange and wonderful through his body. Neuropsychologists call it awe.

The galaxy had always been there, but it wasn’t until Acosta escaped the pollution of light and life that he could be dwarfed by its majesty. In the darkness, his regrets grew faint. In the hush, his anxieties quieted.

A reverence overcame Acosta as the universe got bigger and he, and his problems, got smaller. The darker it got, the more he saw.

“It was like confession,” he said. “Confession with the universe.”

Four years later, with the country feeling as alienated as Acosta was at his low point, he packed the Jeep with too few snacks, his fiancee and a couple of friends and set off to visit seven dark sites in seven nights across big ol’ Texas.

From atop the Lighthouse formation at Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle to the McDonald Observatory 100 miles from the Mexican border, Acosta left open his camera’s shutter to try to capture in images what he was unable to express in words.

They had six nights of clear, starry skies before the Jeep broke down on the way to the seventh. But Acosta was grateful to return to his point of reference, to rethink and reconnect under the heavens.

“When it’s quiet and still, there is a voice there,” he said. “Whether you call it one thing, or your faith refers to it as another, that voice is there.”

It is no accident that the root of the word consider — to reflect carefully or observe closely — is the Latin word for star.

Read the full Washington Post article here.