Who Owns the Sun?

To date, no one owns the sun or the moon or the planets. Not even a simple star! You can “wish upon a star”.  You can “catch a falling star and put it in your pocket”.  You can “hitch your wagon” to one. You can whistle along while Willie Nelson sings about that “stardust melody”.  Don’t think about owning the temporary Comet Neowise that’s been skirting our evening skies recently!

Some people have been snookered into buying stars for their loved ones or friends, and that’s how my name has become attached to half a star in the constellation of Aquarius, as in “this is the dawning of the age of…”. According to an official gift certificate presented to me and my wife by a friend through the International Star Registry, which lists the telescopic coordinates of our astronomical namesake, I really do have connections with the heavens above. Said Star Registry claims “there is no greater honor than writing one’s name among the stars.” Just overnight, I became half a star with my better half laying claim to the same great honor.

Let me make it clear, especially to the property tax folk, that there is no legal claim that we actually “own” this star at all. The company that hoodwinked the folks to purchase the aforementioned star in Aquarius, is a very earthbound entity. So, let’s get down to earth on the matter of ownership.  For it’s there — down on earth — that we humans have laid claim to every parcel of property and every acre of land we can find.  Staked it out in metes and bounds and put our names on it. Mark Twain once noted that “Man is the only patriot. Sets himself within the lines of his own country and hires assassins at a great price to protect those lines. We have done this so that there is not an acre of earth left that is in the rightful possession of its owner.”

When all’s said and done, this earth of “ours” is merely another heavenly body which we have parceled into time-sharing nations and states and street addresses on which we may live from generation to generation. When you take a snapshot of it from the edges of our universe, it looks like every other star in all of those constellations that fill the nightly skies. Just a “pale blue dot”, as Carl Sagan once dubbed it. Maybe someone on a far distant galaxy has been bamboozled into buying this thing for which there “is no greater honor than writing one’s name among the stars.”

What if we owned up to the fact that we are all just visiting travelers on this immense journey through space and time. We can walk out of some starry night, look up and connect those points of light with lines of our own to create our personal constellation akin to Aquarius or the Gemini twins or even the Little Dipper whose handle ends with Polaris by which others might determine true north and navigate their way of seeing through the foolishness of owning any star to begin with, even for just one brief shining moment.