Uluru – close enough to touch

There are moments that reset you completely.

Standing under the night sky at Uluru with my six-week-old daughter in my arms was one of them.

No city glow. No cloud cover. Just the desert and the ancient red rock and a sky so thick with stars it looked solid. The Milky Way not as a suggestion but as a structure, a river of light overhead so close you felt you could reach up and drag your fingers through it.

I have stood under many skies. I have never felt the universe that close.

My daughter was six weeks old. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t walk. She had no words for what she was seeing. But her eyes were open and she was looking up and somewhere in that six-week-old body something was receiving it.

The Anangu people have been reading this sky for 60,000 years. The oldest continuous astronomical tradition on earth. They knew every star by name long before any other civilization thought to look up.

Standing there I understood why. Some skies demand to be witnessed. Some moments ask you to be very small and very grateful simultaneously.

That’s what we mean by waking up somewhere.

Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder