Aspen Times Essay Urges Residents to Trade Screen Data for Sky Presence

Aspen —The sun drops behind the Roan Mountain range, painting the sky in bruised purples and burnt oranges. The air turns sharp. It’s cold enough to see your breath, but warm enough to sit on the tailgate of a truck and watch the first stars prick through the dark.

That quiet moment is disappearing from our daily routine. We are looking down more than we are looking up.

The Aspen Times published a piece this week that hits close to home for anyone who has spent time in the valley. The writer admits she is as guilty as the next person. She pops outside to connect with the sky in fits and starts. Sometimes she watches the sunset every night, honoring solstices and lunar cycles with ceremony. Other times, she phones it in with a quick peek out the bedroom window. More often than she cares to admit, she is oblivious until the moon’s phase or the sun’s angle forces her attention.

The core problem isn’t a lack of knowledge. It’s a lack of presence.

We check an app to see what phase the moon is in. We scan astrology software to locate Venus. We know, intellectually, that the equinox came and went. But knowing isn’t the same as being in a relationship with it. The writer argues that astrology has become another way of collecting data rather than experiencing connection. We know where the planets are. We know what they mean. But we aren’t sitting still, sans phone, breathing in and out with the heavens above.

This disconnect is particularly stark as we acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The Ute people were looking at this sky long before the rest of us got here — not in the ’60s or ’70s, but millennia ago. They maintained a deeply rooted relationship with the earth and sky despite horrific efforts to sever them from their traditions.

Make no mistake, this is about land and belonging. The writer challenges the casual judgment we use to shame one another’s “localness.” We have mountains to learn from the Utes, who migrated through, lived with, and embodied what we now call “our” valley. Let’s remember that the next time we whine about how much things have changed since we first arrived here. We arrived way after the Utes.

The piece suggests a simple shift for this week. Instead of asking the sky to tell us something about ourselves, go outside and simply be with what’s above. Look up. Chill out. Notice what comes alive inside of you.

It’s a hard ask in a town built on high-speed internet and 24-hour commerce. But the sky doesn’t care about your Wi-Fi signal. It’s been doing its thing since before we paved the road to Maroon Bells.

The writer describes what that connection feels like when she’s in her groove: reverence, gratitude, and awe. A communion with the sky. An exchange of breaths. When she’s not in her groove, she finishes hikes feeling like she has left her body, absorbed in her head until she loses all sense of where she is. It’s a creepy kind of disconnection.

We are trading awe for data. We are trading presence for information.

The article ends on an open question: What happens when the...? It cuts off, leaving the reader to fill in the blank. Maybe it’s about what happens when we stop looking at screens and start looking up. Maybe it’s about what happens when we remember who was here first.

The sky is still there. It doesn’t need an app to tell you it’s full moon. You just have to look up.