This is one of the main benefits I love of living in the country. It is also something I have grown up appreciating. The paddocks of my youth lay beneath a huge, open country sky. Storms could be seen approaching from miles away. Sunsets that coloured the whole sky were an every day (but still appreciated) thing. 

A friend of mine raised her five children in the city. She told me years ago how one of the little ones was amazed when he asked at aged four, what the lights in the sky were, only to be told they were stars. "As in Twinkle, Twinkle?" the little boy had asked. She felt ashamed to have assumed the little boy had known what he was singing about in the nursery rhyme that he knew so well. Stars in their city streets were not to be seen. The streetlights were too bright to see what lay beyond them. It had only been a trip to the country that had revealed what stars actually were to him. 

Many times when living in the tropics almost two decades ago, friends and I would spend simple evenings lying on the beach chatting, as we watched the night-sky unfold. Shooting stars were incredibly common up there on the island, far from the lights of towns or villages of the mainland. 

Despite the millions of stars I marvelled at the other night near home, a sky so thick that the Milky Way was spotted without effort, my favourite part of the night-sky is always watching the first evening star come out. There is a look-out point high above the town near where I grew up. Way below, the streetlights can be seen. But as the last hues of sunset show their last light, one only has to look a little in one particular direction and wait. And then sure enough, every night without fail, the first star of the evening becomes apparent there, shining brighter than any street lights below would dare. 

It is then followed by another, and then another, until the idea of even attempting to count them becomes absurd, with the sky a magnificent blanket of stars shimmering above. When I lived in a European city for a few years, it was the country sky I missed the most. I wasn't ready to come home to Australia yet, but I knew I could not survive without seeing a vast sky again before long. So I headed off the deserts of the Middle East instead, and marvelled at the enormity of clean, open skies again, satisfying my yearnings that only a full sky of stars can do. 

This week, when I stood in awe yet again of the sky above me, I forgot that it was winter and below freezing, as I looked skyward. I didn't think that I was just a little person in a vast universe. Instead I felt immense blessings and awe, that not only was I looking at something so incredible that the human language could never truly do it justice with a verbal description, but that I was indeed a part of this amazing universe. 

Just as every single star I looked at was needed to complete the magnificence of the sky above me, every single person on the Earth is just as significant as each other in completing the scenes unfolding on the ground. And while we humans certainly would not paint such a perfect picture as the sky above when it comes to working in sync with the universe and its natural ways, we too can create a picture of our own magnificence when we act with love and create a beautiful world around us. 

It made me feel very special to know that I was just as important as every single star that was blessing me with its light, as every one of us are. We are all special. We are all a part of the big picture. We are all magnificent. We are all here to share our light. 

So when you next find yourself under a vast, clear sky, overflowing with millions of stars, sure, marvel at its beauty. But don't forget that you too have your own magnificence and that you too add to the complete picture. This alone, makes every one of us a pretty amazing contribution to this incredible, magnificent universe. How blessed we are, indeed.