Reading meaning in the skies is a time-honored activity; as practiced today, the distribution and motion of matter on large scales, as traced by galaxies, is believed to contain information on the origin of density fluctuations in an early epoch of inflation. While there is uncertainty in the degree to which visible galaxies trace dark mass, there is internal evidence in statistics of the distribution of galaxies that structure is shaped by gravity and that galaxies essentially trace mass on large scales. I summarize the current state of the observations and its implications. A growing accumulation of evidence from large scale structure alone suggests that the matter density is less than critical value. Observations are for the most part consistent with, but do not yet require, cold dark matter.