Riding the starry trail of Halley’s Comet

With just over five weeks until my next big art exhibition at the 4 day Festival of the Cranes Art and Craft Fair in Socorro in early December, I take a few days off to celebrate Diwali, sleep on the earth amongst pea fowl, soak in mineral hotsprings and wander my feet on some paths in the Gila National Forest.

I really lucked out with my timing this year for what has become a kind of annual autumn retreat to Faywood Hotsprings. At night I lay in the silky water of the geothermally heated pools beneath a Festival of Lights: the million twinkling stars of cloudless dark side of the moon skies. The star show was the best I’ve ever experienced at this campground. Shooting stars, probably the Oronids which I understand are debris from Halley’s Comet, cascaded all about. Now I know why this phenomenon is called a meteor shower. I really did feel bathed, showered, washed, in magical, mysterious luminosity.

Lying there in that lovely water, I might even have experienced a comet - specifically Comet Lemmon (Comet C/2025 A6) . One of the myriad falling stars trailed a bright tail across the sky just like the cartoons depict comets. Volunteer staff at the next door City of Rocks State Park, a dark sky park, assured me I had seen Comet Lemmon when I popped in to ask about the previous evening’s spectacular star party. Apparently this particular comet isn’t going to visit earth skies again for a thousand years and some. There I was up to my ears in hot water, alone, in the dead of night, when a one in a thousand years comet event lit up the sky. Just another enchanted night in this land of little, everyday milagros.

As the stars fade and the sky brightens into sunrise I find my way back to my campsite to boil a pot of chai.

The local cat population are out and about, overseeing the dawn but feigning indifference as cats do.

The pea fowl pride drop by to check up on my camping protocols and show off the youngest member of the family.

The weather continues to be a good ten degrees or more warmer than average meaning there’s not a lot of good autumn colour in the forests. I hung out in the pools a lot, letting the water soak every last bit of tension from my body.

Little tree lizards were busy on the sun heated rocks surrounding the pools.

Diwali, the Festival of Lights, celebrates the spiritual victory of Dharma over Adharma, light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.

It is an important festival because we have to believe that the kind of victory told of in folk tales, DOES happen, albeit in a long arc. Diwali has probably been celebrated in some form for over 4000 years.

A view of an Indus Valley Civilization archaeological site in the Thar Desert, 1998

The central stories could even have roots in a time way before even the Indus Valley civilization, a time when the gods walked the earth amongst mortals, leaving traces of their fairy dust in human cellular memory. The glitter of ethics. A glint morality. The possibility of enlightenment. A Festival of Lights.

The battles which Diwali references are ageless, timeless, maybe even eternal.

I might not have lit a candle and set it afloat on the Ganges, but Diwali came to me in a meteor shower and brief glimpse of the brilliance of a once in a thousand years comet’s flaring tail, with a side order of pea fowl and progeny whose ancestors (so the story goes) served as steeds for those gods in the Indus Valley all those millennia ago.

Mayura born of the feather of Garuda made manifest in this enchanted life.

There is no other option possible even as we gather and in gathering reflect our erasure.

As in Yoga: the release is in the binding, the discipline, the practice.

Showing up.

Then letting go.