I wish you could have seen what I saw tonight. There was no way a camera would pick up anything in the twilight. Description will have to do.

I was in a car being driven along the very bottom of the African continent, the raging wind catching the spray from the wild sea sending it streaming sideways. I've never seen such a thing. Each wave created its own horizontal waterfall giving the illusion that the waves were crashing in two directions.

To make the scene even more surreal, the sun set an hour ago and the sky is a deep warm pink. To the horizon, a streak of dark blue rapidly grows, reaching up into the sky as the sun sinks behind the earth. A bright star shone brightly, all alone.

I caught myself trying to name it. Wrong hemisphere. The sky will be different here and my sense of astronomy is all off balance. The planets circle to the north, the closest pole is to the south, in the summer the sun will rise southeast and set southwest giving us long days. I know it but I can't feel it. I'm upside down.

Once upon a time someone named the north pole "NORTH" and decided it should be up the earth. The "SOUTH" is south of course and should be down. It was a decision based most probably on the geocentric, self-centric western society that no doubt thought, regardless of gravity, that the idea of walking upside down on a little ball called Earth was ridiculously stupid. "Obviously, we're not upside down. So let's put ourselves top-side." Curiously, the person saying this in my mind has a posh, stuffy British accent.

Based on this whimsical up-down decision we oriented ourselves to the universe. The sun rises from the east and sets in the west. There are stars which are below the earth, stars that are above and others that are to the sides. In fact, when we chart the known universe in relation to earth, everything is placed on this up-down grid.

But what if we have it wrong. What if we don't spin around the sun like an egg spinning around an orange on a counter top. What if we're more like a farris wheel, cresting to the top of our elliptical orbit and then spiraling down to the bottom, only to be drawn back up by the gravity of the sun. Or what if we should flip the whole thing upside down and call the south pole "NORTH" and the north pole "SOUTH" and reorient our entire universe?

The only thing that would really change, when it comes down to it, is our maps and our brains. The rest of the universe wouldn't be phased a bit. Except maybe the aliens who are, as we speak, desperately trying to decode our unmanned spaceship that despite all efforts, probably give very earth-centric directions to our front door.