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Humankind has always had an attraction to the stars. Stargazing, traveling or dreaming, the stars have offered a destination just beyond our reach.

To reach for the stars is to extend your hope beyond our human limitations. To reach for the stars is to expect greater than the confines of our own imaginings. The stars hold promise, a bright light leading the way into a future that has yet to be written. The stars have guided travelers for centuries and led them to faraway places and faraway dreams.

To reach for the stars is to dare to dream impossible dreams, dreams fueled by a childlike wonder, when we first gazed, as children to the starry night filled with pinpricks of light.

The Greeks named the stars as their gods, and worship their passage across the heavens. Orion's belt points to the guiding light of the North Star, leading sailors to safety. The Greeks believed that a chariot carried their gods across the sky, carrying the sun, carrying with it day and night.

To reach for the stars is to dream the big dream, to throw caution and logic to the wind. When you don't reach for the stars, your dreams remain earthbound, perhaps too logic and weighed down with the gravity and grave responsibilities of this world. But the stars, ah, there is an unknown world, a frontier that no one has yet to explore, a place where anything can happen, a place where the quiet night sky fills with light and peace.

Even though science has now informed us that stars are made of elements, chemicals, gasses and solids, just like our own earth, they still hold the poets call to immortality, to purity and to a future unbound by restriction.A falling star may be the death knoll of a star from a galaxy light years away, but to the observer here on earth, the line of its flight is an opportunity to dream anew, to cast a wish, to catch it and save it for a rainy day, as the childhood song reminds us to do. Shooting stars light up the night for a brief moment. Even knowing that their brightness is reaching us light years after the stars passing, a shooting star brings hope and a chance to wish.

A star may be a cluster of gasses and rocks, an uninhabitable burning, fiery mass, hotter than our sun but the stars will always hold our dreams. The dreamers who reach for the star plot a course for a brave future, a place where hope resides, a place just out of reach of the ordinary, where extraordinary begins its tentative journey.

Learn more about this author, Melanie Grimes.
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