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Our Military Grade Night Vision Goggles and Ancient Stories May Turn You Into a Wonder Junkie!
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Seven Sunrise and Sunset Sedona Stargazing Locations & Storytelling Meditations Changing the way you see the Sky Forever
BELL ROCK
Before the trails. Before the meditations. Before any of this makes sense.
Go to Bell Rock, or find your own equivalent — any rock, any stone wall, any piece of ground that has been here longer than you have.
Place your hands flat against it.
Feel the iron in the stone calling to the iron in your blood. You don’t need to understand that yet. Just feel it.
We are People of Earth.
Before separation, there was belonging.
My hope for this book is the same hope I carry into every stargazing tour I guide: to change the way you see the night sky and the stars forever — not just while you’re here in Sedona, but always.
I know it’s a tall request. But after 500 nights under these stars, I’ve watched it happen again and again.
Right now, you probably call it “watching the sunset.” After this book, you’ll feel the Earth rolling you away from the Sun — slowly, silently — turning you into starlight. You’ll stop saying “the sun is going down.” You’ll feel yourself turning with everyone. And you’ll know: the sunset you’re watching right now is someone else’s sunrise. Same moment. Same breath.
You don’t have to believe it. You’re already in it. And once you feel it, you can’t unfeel it.
And here’s the truth I’ve learned: You don’t need Sedona’s red rocks for this to happen. You don’t need perfect dark skies or a telescope or any special equipment.
You just need a quiet hill.
Wherever you stand — let the land speak. Let the light name you. You are not separate. You are not lost.
You are only changing clothes.
This book has two paths through it.
The first follows Ahwon — a story that runs through the whole book like a river. If you want to read it straight through, follow the Ahwon sections. They will carry you from beginning to end without interruption.
The second path is the pilgrimage. Each Ahwon passage opens a door. The meditation that follows walks you through it. Take both paths together and the book becomes a seven-trail journey through Sedona — and through yourself.
Either way, you are not lost. You are here.
Playin’ with the Mystery
Before philosophy, before religion, before science, before we had neat systems for any of this, we had the questions.
Who am I? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is real? Am I alone? Why does a lizard stare at you and do push-ups? What is consciousness? Does my life matter? How should I live? Are we separate, or one?
You don’t really solve questions like these. You spend your life inside them.
So did a girl named Roeweena, watching ice melt at the edge of a desert pond.
Once, when she was small, while holding her hand carved necklace of the seven wolves, Roeweena asked her grandfather why stars twinkle.
He thought about it longer than most grown-ups do when children ask beautiful questions. Reaching down and sliding his fingers over the sage bushes that surrounded them and smelling them as if he were breathing in his answer.
“They don’t twinkle, sweetheart,” he said. “They’re waving. They’ve been traveling a long time to reach you, and they’re happy they finally arrived.”
She laughed.
But he wasn’t entirely wrong.
What he meant was simple enough:
Almost every star you see tonight sent its light long before you were born. Some of it left before your grandparents were born. Before this country existed. Before the countries before that. For hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, it crossed the dark in silence. Tonight, that journey reaches you. Light takes time. A journey is not complete until it arrives somewhere — a pair of night vision goggles, a camera sensor, or the soft contact lens on the surface of a human eye. Your eye. Here, alive, where that old light finally lands. Which means the universe did not simply send light to you. “In a strange way,” he said, “the universe traveled home.” And here is the part that catches in the chest: You and that star are made of the same kind of matter.
The iron in your blood. The calcium in your bones. Even the oxygen moving through you right now. All of it was forged in stars long before you arrived to ask what any of this means.
So no, it’s not only that the universe sent something out and you happened to catch it. It’s more like a piece of it found a place to land for a moment — here, with you.
Rising from Leaving The Ice, the Pipe, and the Game
Before the tour began, they sat beside a still pool at the edge of the trail, the air still carried the smell of rain from earlier.
The last light was leaving the sky. Along the bank, a thin shelf of ice held the color a little longer than the rocks did — rose first, then amber, then that exact blue that only lasts a few minutes in the evening before it vanishes so completely you start to wonder if you imagined it.
Roeweena kept watching.
Her grandfather tipped his chin toward the pond. “Look at the ice.”
She had already been looking, but she looked harder.
A narrow thread of melted muddy water had opened along the edge. Once she saw it, she could not stop seeing it.
“It doesn’t melt toward anything,” she said.
“No.”
He bent, picked up a pebble, rubbed it once with his thumb, and let it rest in his palm.
“It just gives way.”
She glanced at him.
“From the center.”
A small breeze moved across the surface. Not enough to wrinkle the pond, only enough to disturb the reflection and let it settle again.
He waited. She knew that quiet of his. It meant he was not finished, but he wanted to see where her mind would go before he stepped in.
“That’s what everything does?”
“More or less.”
She pulled her sleeves over her hands. “That sounds too big.”
“It is big.”
He smiled, though not because it was funny.
“The star you’ll be looking at later does it. Light pouring out in every direction at once. Your breath does it. Fire does it. Heat does it. The wood in a fire is only releasing sunlight it stored when it was still a tree, which sounds like something somebody would invent to be lovely, except it also happens to be true.”
He pointed lightly toward her face.
“The breath you just let out — same story.”
She looked back at the water.
The ice had darkened at the edges. Its shape was loosening.
“It doesn’t know it will be steam someday,” she said.
“No. The way a star doesn’t know it may one day be part of a planet. Or a leaf. Or your hand. Things keep becoming other things. Not neatly. Not in a straight line.”
She crouched and touched the wet stone beside the ice, the sound of the wind from the wings of a crow flying by overhead.
“That sound,” he said, “The breath you just let out — same story.”
“Not the same,” she said quietly. “But not another either.”
He turned all the way toward her.
“Where did you hear that?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t. It just came.”
He was silent for a moment.
“There’s an old Pali phrase. Na ca so na ca añño. Not the same. Not another.”
She wiped her fingertips against her sleeve, though there was nothing on them.
“Ice becomes water. Water becomes steam. Steam becomes rain. Rain becomes ice again. You can’t honestly call it the same. But you can’t call it something entirely different either.”
She stayed crouched there a moment longer, staring at the soft boundary where frozen became unfrozen.
“A monk in India got to almost the same place,” he said. “Thousands of years ago.”
Her head lifted slightly.
“He’d never been to this desert. You’ve never read those texts. Still — same place.”
He looked back at the pond.
“Different path.”
She stood slowly. “So I’m like that too.”
“Yes.”
He said it simply, without ceremony.
“You are not the same person you were ten years ago. You’re not even the same person you were this morning. Matter moves through you. Breath moves through you. Time does what time does. But you are not somebody else.”
She pressed her thumb into the center of her palm as if testing the truth of something there.
“When you feel lost,” he said, “watch something melt. Ice. Snow. Wax. A candle or a campfire. Whatever’s near. Notice that it doesn’t melt in one direction. It yields from all sides. Sometimes people do too.”
He handed her the pebble.
She closed her fingers around it.
“That warmth in your chest,” he said, seeing her hand drift there without meaning to, “that’s starlight too. Freed, changed, moving through another form.”
For a second she looked embarrassed to have been caught doing something so unplanned, but she left her hand where it was.
He reached down, picked up another stone, and held it out to her.
“Drop it.”
They let the stones fall almost together.
Two splashes. Close, but separate.
They watched the rings move out.
Each ripple had its own center, its own outward motion, its own round insistence.
Where they met, something else appeared. Not a crash. Not an erasing. A pattern neither ring had carried alone.
Roeweena leaned forward. “What is that?”
“In physics, interference.”
He crouched too now, hands and knees in the dirt, watching the water with her.
“Two waves meet, and the meeting produces something new.”
The ripples widened. The shared pattern widened with them.
“And that new pattern?”
“It travels too.”
She watched until the water almost settled.
“It feels like the same motion,” she said. “The ice. The rings. Light from a star. People meeting.”
He nodded once. “At different scales, yes.”
The last circles disappeared into dark water.
“But the meeting doesn’t disappear just because I can’t still see it, does it?”
“No.”
He slapped his empty hand lightly against his thigh to shake off the dirt.
“It was small, but it wasn’t nothing. The world had changed a little.”
She watched the rings widen until they thinned into what looked like stillness. Then, without meaning to, she drew in a breath. The cold entered her nose, her throat, her chest. When she let it go, it appeared before her for a moment — pale, soft, rising — and then was gone into the dark. Her eyes stayed on the place where it had been.
“That too,” she said.
Her grandfather looked at her, waiting.
“The stones move the water and you can see the rings. Bigger stone, bigger rings. Smaller stone, smaller ones.” She moved her hand once through the cold air between them. “But this does it too, doesn’t it? My hand. My breath. I just can’t see the rings the same way.”
Something in his face brightened. She looked back at the pond.
“So every movement makes something. Dropping a stone. Moving a hand. Breathing out. Speaking. Walking past somebody.” She paused. “You can never not be making something.”
He smiled. “Yes. That is daily life, really — picking something up and putting it over there. Breath included.”
She laughed softly, but not because it was funny.
He touched two fingers lightly to his chest, then opened his hand toward the water, the sky, the others standing near the bank. “You take what is out here and bring it in. Then you take what is in here and give it back. Most things are some version of that.”
Roeweena watched her breath disappear again. “It feels bigger than that,” she said.
“It is bigger than that,” he said. “But it is not more complicated.” He looked toward the pond. “The water lets you see the lesson. Breath lets you live inside it.”
She stood very still after that, watching the dark where her breath had been, as though something had just stepped closer without making a sound.
“That air that you just picked up from the world around you when you breathed in … just now,” he said softly. “That air in your lungs contains atoms that have passed through other lungs. Not as metaphor. Literally. The Rarámuri have a word for the sacred sharedness of life and breath: iwígara. Hard to remember sometimes, but the air in your lungs has been moving through other lives for longer than either of us can imagine.”
She held the breath a second, and he could tell she was actually trying to imagine it.
“This breath has moved through forests, kitchens, children, old people, cities, animals, oceans. Even through your great great great grandmother. Maybe through someone born yesterday.”
She exhaled.
In the cold, her breath showed itself — thin, pale, rising.
He pointed upward. “Look.”
She lifted her eyes.
The Big Dipper hung above them, clear in the cold dark.
She looked down, because she had already learned that with him the second look mattered as much as the first.
The pond held the same shape below, turned over in the water.
Above and below. Two bowls. Two handles. One sky doubled.
For a moment she had the strange feeling of standing between two worlds that were not actually two.
“Some Native traditions,” he said, his voice lower now, “see that shape as the sacred pipe.”
She looked again. Once he said it, she could see the bowl and stem clearly.
“The smoke from the pipe is breath made visible. What is inside you goes out. It enters the air. It enters others. It enters the sky.”
He watched her watch her own breath.
“The ceremony didn’t make the connection. It just gave people a way to notice what was already true.”
She exhaled again, more deliberately this time.
“So my breath is the smoke.”
“Yes.”
“And every exhale is part of it.”
“Yes.”
Her gaze moved from the pipe above to the pipe below.
“We’re inside it.”
“We always were.”
She looked over at the others near the water’s edge and saw their breath lifting too, each one pale and temporary, joining the same cold dark.
“We’ve been doing this all evening,” she said.
He smiled. “We finally named it.”
For a while they stood there without speaking, two figures between the pipe in the sky and the pipe in the water.
At last he said, “The stars do this in other ways too. Same stars. Seen differently.”
He pointed toward Orion.
“When it climbs higher, most people see the hunter. Trace those stars another way and it becomes a left hand reaching. Turn the pattern again and you get a scorpion with its tail raised.”
She frowned up at it.
“In the same stars?”
“Not different stars. A different here.”
Without quite deciding to, she lifted her own left hand. The belt aligned near her wrist. The hanging stars became a thumb. She tilted her hand and lost it, tilted back and found it again.
Hand. Scorpion. Hand again.
She lowered her arm slowly.
“The kindness and the sting,” she said. “Both there.”
He looked at her, not the sky.
“Both in us too.”
His voice went quieter.
“Being kind doesn’t mean you were never stung. It means you don’t let the sting tell you what kind of person to be.”
Something changed in his face after that. Not exactly sadness. More like memory arriving without permission.
“My grandmother showed me those same stars once,” he said. He was quiet a moment in a way that meant the memory was still alive. “She didn’t see a hunter. She saw a dragonfly. And over there, a canoe. She called the dragonfly by her own mother’s name. Akitsushima,” he said, after a moment. As if the word itself were the thing it described.
Roeweena searched for them.
“The dragonfly moves between worlds,” he said. “Water and air. What has been and what is coming.”
“And the canoe?”
“How you cross the dark when you can’t see the bottom.”
She shoved her hands into her pockets and kept looking, her shoulders lifting slightly against the cold.
“So it’s all there,” she said slowly. “The hunter. The hand. The scorpion. The dragonfly. The canoe. Same sky, anyhow — just understood from different places.”
He let out a breath through his nose, almost a laugh, almost grief.
“The same sky,” he said. “People just hear different things in it.”
“The wolves necklace you are wearing was carved by her.”
Roeweena instinctively reached for the necklace, the smooth carved wood, and could feel her.
They stood in that for a while.
At one point she said, very softly, almost as if she were reporting something she had overheard rather than invented, “Every night we do this, it feels like practicing heaven.”
He looked at her. “Practicing heaven, nice, yes.” Then looked away.
When she glanced back a moment later, his head was tilted up and his left arm was reaching to the sky, the red trail light in his hand aimed into the dark without him seeming to notice.
What she heard next was so quiet she first thought she had imagined it.
“The center of all,” he murmured, “expressing its living relationship with and within the indescribably mysterious, one together.”
She turned toward him.
He seemed unaware he had said anything at all.
Neither of them rushed to explain it.
Eventually he brushed dust from his hands and, with a suddenness that made her laugh, asked, “Rootbeer float? Hungry?”
“I had an orange before we left.”
“Good.”
He started up the trail.
“You already understand more than you think.”
She followed, then glanced back once at the pond. The ice was still loosening. The pipe still hung above and floated below. The rings from the stones were long gone, though she could not shake the feeling that gone was not the right word.
“The orange—”
He kept walking. “Was part of the same lesson.”
She waited.
“Sunlight. Tree. Rain. Soil. Time. All of it met in one place and became something you could hold.”
“And then I ate it.”
He half turned, still walking backward for a few steps.
“Yes. But even that’s not the whole thing. It isn’t just that you ate an orange. Something outside you met something inside you, and now it’s part of you. That meeting changed the playing field.”
She stumbled a little, her shoe caught on a tripping rock.
“Every meal?”
“Every meal. Every breath. Every real encounter.”
He faced forward again. “Seems to me things are always meeting and becoming something a little different. Like letters in the alphabet, shifting and rearranging into different words. Like your name, Roeweena. Rearrange the letters, and what do you have?”
She looked down at her hands, flexed her fingers once, and walked on.
“So I’m the meeting point.”
He nudged a loose stone off the trail with the side of his boot and kept walking.
“Watch your step here,” he said.
She followed him a few paces before speaking again.
With a sly quirky smile she said, “Another tripping rock.”
A smile touched his mouth, though he did not turn around.
He gestured toward the dark around them — rock, tree, wash, sky.
“Nothing living is as separate as we like to think.”
“The Vedic sages had a name for that too, didn’t they?”
“They called it Indra’s Net.”
His arm waving across the sky.
“A field of jewels, each reflecting all the others. They got there through long meditation. You got there through an orange.”
That made her laugh in spite of herself.
“And when two people really see each other?” she asked. “When something real passes between them?”
He did not answer immediately. He stepped over a rock in the trail, waited for her to do the same, and only then said, “That changes the field too. Maybe more than we know.”
They walked until the last band of light gave out and the sky opened wide above them.
She stopped again.
“Wait.”
He turned.
“If that star’s light is reaching me right now… am I sending light back?”
“You are.”
“Into the dark, headed to the stars with everything else?”
“Your body radiates infrared all the time. Heat. Photons. They’re leaving you in every direction, including straight up into the great silence.”
She looked down at her own hands as if they were doing something she hadn’t given them permission to do. Then back up at the star.
“So something out there might receive my light long after I’m gone.”
“Yes, along with what it has become.”
“And when it gets there?”
“It completes, the same way theirs completed in you.”
She stood very still, and for once it was not the stillness of listening. It was the stillness of the floor dropping away a little under thought.
“So it isn’t one-way.”
“No. It never really was.”
Her face changed with that. It wasn’t awe or wonder exactly. It felt more like a combination of both, a remembering, a recognition.
“Where does my light go?”
“At first you think of it as yours — your heat, your light, your little bit of life. But it doesn’t stay that tidy. It goes out, mixes with everything else, and after a while ‘only mine’ just stops being the most honest way to talk about it.”
“Like a drop going into the ocean.”
“Yes.” He placed his hands in his hoodie for warmth. “And the drop doesn’t vanish. It’s just harder, after that, to talk about it like it was ever only by itself.”
She nodded. Another thought found her.
“The orange again.”
He laughed softly. “Of course the orange again.”
“The tree made it from light.”
He spoke more slowly now, because she was following. “Leaves catching photons. Light becoming sugar. Sugar becoming fruit. The tree building matter out of sunlight with time and patience and rain.”
“The tree is made of sunlight.”
“Organized sunlight.”
That pleased her so much she smiled before she meant to.
“And then I eat it.”
“And then that light becomes you.” He pointed upward. “And later it leaves you again.”
She went quiet. Then she pressed one hand flat against her sternum.
“It’s not just the orange,” she said slowly. “It’s happening right now. This breath. This moment.”
He watched her without speaking.
“Every breath,” she said. “All the time.”
“All the time,” he said. “Forever.”
“So let me see if I’ve got this right — that same sunlight went into the tree, then the orange, then me… and now it’s somehow in here being my thoughts?”
He gave in and laughed. “That is not how a physicist would say it.”
“But?”
“But I understand what you mean.”
She looked down the trail and spoke almost to herself. “Nothing is lost.”
“Not in the way we fear, no.”
He then exhaled a long slow breath watching it rise up into the pipe made of stars.
“And the rock? Or the tree? Or the river?” she asked.
“It’s part of the same motion.”
“Everything,” he said. “Every rock, every river, every living thing. Nothing sitting still. Nothing truly separate. There is no new matter in this universe — everything is the original everything, rearranged. Na ca so na ca añño. Just the one motion, wearing every possible shape.”
She went very still.
“So when I stand in a forest,” she said, “I’m not surrounded by other things.”
“No.”
“I’m surrounded by other arrangements of the same thing.”
He said nothing. He just looked up. She followed his gaze — the stars, the dark between them, the same sky that had been watching all of this for longer than either of them could hold in their minds.
“We’re all ponds,” she said.
Smiling now but he kept looking up.
She bent and put her hand on the canyon wall beside the trail.
Earlier that day she had traced its layers with her fingers, each one a compressed world.
“Something carved it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It looks like damage, like it would have hurt.”
He said nothing.
She kept her palm against the stone.
“But maybe the losses, the pain, the things that wear us down — maybe that isn’t only destruction.”
Her fingers pressed a little harder.
“The chisel,” she said.
He did not rush to answer. He did not need to.
After a while, without removing her hand from the stone, she asked, “And death?”
His reply came gently.
“Maybe death is more like this: the part of you that was moving through this form steps on and keeps going.”
Her shoulders rose, then fell.
A longer silence came after that — one of those silences that feels like someone talking to themselves. When she finally spoke again, it was quick, almost like she was afraid the question would vanish if she didn’t catch it.
“How long has my own light been traveling?”
“Since the beginning.”
“The beginning of what?”
“You.”
He held her gaze there.
“From the moment you were born, light has been leaving you. Your first breath. Your first cry. The first time your eyes opened. Photons left your body then, and they have never stopped.”
“They’re still going?”
“Yes.”
“And every moment since?”
“Yes.”
She looked up, then back at herself, palms open.
“So every moment of my life is still out there.”
“Not as memory. As light in motion.”
“I’m not a line of moments dropping behind me.”
“No, I wouldn’t think of your life as a line dropping behind you. It’s more like it keeps moving outward.”
That one visibly struck her. She lowered onto a flat rock without thinking and sat there in the cold as if her knees had quietly decided for her.
“So it’s not being kept somewhere like a record. It’s still… happening its way outward.”
He nodded.
She looked down at her hands as if they belonged to someone she had just met.
“But light doesn’t carry feeling,” she said. “Not the way I mean it. A photon has energy. Frequency. It doesn’t carry what it felt like to be me in that moment.”
He was quiet longer this time.
“You’re right to ask that.”
He looked up before he kept going.
“Physics takes you to the edge of that question and stops. I can’t prove that meaning travels the way light does. I only know the gap between what we can measure and what we know another way is not a useless gap. It may be where the real questions live.”
“So you don’t know.”
“No.”
He smiled, but only a little.
“I know enough to keep standing under the sky and pointing.”
He picked up an oak branch off the ground and stared into it like he saw something inside it, snapped it in half, and kept walking.
“Every tradition that looked carefully enough found some version of this. Not the same words. Never the same words.” He told her of webs of relation and exchange. Of Wunan. Of Wyrd — not fate as something dead and fixed, but weaving. Thread touching thread. Pull one thing and the whole pattern moves. She looked down at her hands. “The word weird used to mean something closer to the force moving through connected things.” She rolled that around silently.
“There’s another word I’m reaching for,” he said.
He stopped walking for a moment and looked at the ground — not at anything on it, just at the ground the way people do when they’re listening inward.
“It’ll come. It doesn’t matter.”
He kept walking. It didn’t come.
“And Bashō,” he said, almost to himself.
“Who?”
“A Japanese poet. He wrote about a frog jumping into an old pond. That’s all, really. A tiny moment. But he caught the whole universe in it because he understood something people keep forgetting: if you are still enough, a small event is not small.”
He tossed the broken branch onto the small fire he started and carefully set aside the other part.
“That frog Bashō wrote about — in a way, it never finished jumping. Same with these stones. Same with this pond. That’s not just coincidence to me. I think life does that.”
She laughed the way people do when something simple opens so suddenly it almost hurts.
“Like the stones.”
“Yes.”
“The ice.”
“Yes.”
“The breath. The pipe. The stars.”
“All of it.”
He looked around at the dark as if it were listening too.
“I don’t think that’s coincidence,” he said. “I think that’s the way things are made.”
“So oneness isn’t losing myself.”
“No.”
“It’s finding out what I actually am.”
He did not answer right away, because she had already said it well.
Behind them, the fire burning low around a ring of stones.
Something lighter crossed her face.
“Wait.”
He looked at her.
“If nothing was ever actually separate…”
She stopped and started over, frustrated, smiling now because the words were arriving reversed and backwards.
“If the universe was never truly lost from itself — if it only seemed lost, I mean, or hidden, or… no, hidden is closer…”
She looked up.
“That’s what this is, isn’t it? Hide-and-seek. Not us looking for something far away — the mystery sort of hiding inside everything, even inside us. And somehow we’re both part of it. The one tucked away and the one trying to find it.”
That was when he laughed — not politely, not like a guide encouraging a guest, but with the surprise of someone who has just heard an old truth spoken in a new voice.
She stared at him.
“Well, in any good game, the one hiding is hoping somebody comes close, almost hiding in plain sight. Otherwise it’s not much of a game. The hiding is part of how the finding happens.”
That hit at once.
“The mystery isn’t keeping itself from me.”
She laughed then, because she heard the next line before she said it.
“It’s me. Crouched behind a bush with a lizard doing push-ups, trying not to laugh.”
For a long moment neither of them spoke.
She looked up at the Milky Way — ancient light still arriving, still completing — and something in her face shifted again. Not just awe. Not just relief. More like the feeling at the end of a very long joke when the punchline lands and you realize the joke has been kind the whole time.
“It’s been waiting,” she said.
He looked up with her.
“For you to look.”
“And laugh.”
You have already been here. The ice, the pond, the pipe in the stars — you walked through this in the opening pages. Now you are at the threshold of the first trail, and the land asks you to re-enter one moment of that story. Not because you forgot it. Because you are standing in it now.
∙
AHWON Rising from Leaving — The Threshold
He pointed upward. “Look.”
She lifted her eyes.
The Big Dipper hung above them, clear in the cold dark.
She looked down, because she had already learned that with him the second look mattered as much as the first.
The pond held the same shape below, turned over in the water.
Above and below. Two bowls. Two handles. One sky doubled.
For a moment she had the strange feeling of standing between two worlds that were not actually two.
“Some Native traditions,” he said, his voice lower now, “see that shape as the sacred pipe.”
She looked again. Once he said it, she could see the bowl and stem clearly.
“The smoke from the pipe is breath made visible. What is inside you goes out. It enters the air. It enters others. It enters the sky.”
He watched her watch her own breath.
“The ceremony didn’t make the connection. It just gave people a way to notice what was already true.”
She exhaled again, more deliberately this time.
“So my breath is the smoke.”
“Yes.”
“And every exhale is part of it.”
“Yes.”
Her gaze moved from the pipe above to the pipe below.
“We’re inside it.”
“We always were.”
“The sunrise trails begin here. You are already inside what you came to find.”
∙
Breathe. Keep breathing.
Breathe into your heart.
Point to the left. Where does left end? Keep pointing — where does left end?
Point to the right. Where does right end?
Now to the front. Now to the back. Now to the top. Now to the bottom.
None of them end.
Breathe into your heart — why your heart? Because the heart beating establishes here. And here is in relationship to country — the land country, the 360 degrees around you right now — and sky country, the 360 degrees of sky above you. When the heart is not beating there is no here as we know it to be.
Everything is in relationship to somewhere. And here is the center of that relationship.
Like the painter painting a picture of a painting of a painter painting a picture — your thoughts about this are now thoughts about thoughts, and that goes on forever. So your thoughts arrive out of nowhere into somewhere, which is now called here.
Since you can observe your thoughts as separate from you, what we call “you” is not only here — it is both here and somewhere else. That place we call nowhere, because we have no relationship point to show us where nowhere is. That is why we call it nowhere — which could also mean everywhere.
The awareness that is you is both nowhere and everywhere at the same breath.
And that breath — you have caused.
But you cannot stop breathing for very long. So something that is both nowhere and everywhere is breathing you.
It is as if you are being breathed.
That is what this practice is. A way of noticing what is already true.
Every meditation in this book returns to the same ritual: establishing the seven directions from your heart. This is not a metaphor. It is a practical method for remembering where you are. Learn this practice now. You will use it at every trail, at every sunrise, at every sunset. It is the thread that weaves through all seven meditations.
A Sunrise / Sunset Meditation Protocol
Preparation Find your sacred spot — a place where you can witness the sun rising or leaving. Arrive before the transition begins. Stand or sit comfortably where you can see the horizon clearly.
The Practice
Place your hand on your heart. Close your eyes. Breathe in slowly through your nose, feeling your chest rise. Breathe out slowly through your mouth, feeling your chest fall. Do this three times.
The heart beating establishes here.
On the fourth breath, hold your awareness at your heart. Feel the quiet rhythm there — steady, patient, present. When the heart is not beating, there is no here, as we know it to be. And here is in relationship to country — the land, 360 degrees around you right now — and sky country, the 360 degrees of sky above you.
Now notice the breath. You can shape it for a moment — slow it, deepen it, hold it. But you cannot leave it behind. At some point, breath returns. You are not only breathing. You are being breathed.
The heart gives you here. The breath reveals that you are not separate from here.
This is puʻuwai — the seventh direction. You are not lost. You are here.
Breathe into your heart and the two’s arrive. The relationship begins.
With your hand still on your heart, eyes still closed, point outward with your awareness — and as you point, ask:
Left — where does left end? When does left end? Right — where does right end? When does right end? Front — where does front end? Back — where does back end? Above — where does above end? Below — where does below end?
None of them end. The six directions extend beyond what you can measure. Everything is in relationship to somewhere. And here is the center of that relationship.
Open your eyes. Turn your body to harmonize with sky country and country: right shoulder — the east, the rising, the beginning left shoulder — the west, the leaving, the return
Notice your shoulders: Your right shoulder points toward Hikina — rising, east. Your left shoulder points toward Komohana — leaving, west. You are standing at the center of rising and leaving. Both are always happening. You are the still point between them.
Watch the sun without rushing.
At sunrise, say silently or aloud: “This light rising for me is leaving for someone else, right now, at this same moment.”
At sunset, say silently or aloud: “This light leaving for me is rising for someone else, right now, at this same moment.”
The sun does not hurry. The sun does not apologize for rising or leaving. It simply is — exactly where it needs to be, exactly when it needs to be there. And you are here, in relationship to it.
Breathe into your heart again. Notice your thoughts arriving.
Like the painter painting a picture of a painting of a painter painting a picture of a painting, your thoughts about our conversation are now thoughts about the thoughts of our conversation, and that goes on forever.
So your thoughts arrive out of nowhere into somewhere, which is now called here.
Since you can observe your thoughts as separate from you, then what we call you is not here. It is both here and somewhere else, and that place we call nowhere because we have no relationship point to show us where nowhere is, which could also mean everywhere.
So the awareness that is you is both nowhere and everywhere at the same breath. And that breath — you have caused.
With your hand still on your heart, recognize: You are not alone in this moment. Someone, somewhere, is watching this same sun rise while you watch it leave. Someone, somewhere, is watching this same sun leave while you watch it rise. Over eight billion centers. Over eight billion unique views. All held within ALL.
You see what they cannot. They see what you cannot. Together, the whole sky becomes visible. This is Mitakuye Oyasin — all relations radiating from here.
As the transition completes — sunrise becoming day, sunset becoming night — place both hands on your heart.
The heart beating establishes here.
Feel the breath move through you. You can try to stop it. But sooner or later, breath returns. You cannot be separate from it. That is what the breath has always been telling you. You are not alone in this. You are being breathed.
Say silently or aloud: “I am here.” “I am in relationship.” “I am being breathed.”
Closing
Bow your head slightly — not in submission, but in recognition. You have practiced what the stars have been teaching since the beginning: You are not searching for your center. Here is the center of that relationship.
The heart beating establishes here. The breath reveals you are not separate from here.
Carry this knowing with you as you step back into your day or evening. The seven directions travel with you. The pattern continues.
You are here. You are in relationship. You are enough.
This meditation can be practiced daily, seasonally, or whenever you need to remember: you are not lost. You are exactly here.
Waneska (Waniskâ) — Cree Sunrise Song Pronunciation: wah-NEES-kah “Waneska” (standardized as Waniskâ in Cree) means “Wake up!” This traditional Cree Sunrise Song is a morning invocation, celebrating the rising sun, the singing birds, and the beauty of the land. Sung to greet the dawn, it reflects the Cree worldview of interconnectedness and gratitude for creation. Cree: Waniskâ! pêtâpan ôma, âsay piyêsîsak kî-nikamowak, ê-miyonâkwan kitaskînaw Translation: Wake up! The sun is coming. The birds are already singing. How beautiful this land of ours is. Source: Shared by Cree cultural knowledge holders, including Art Napoleon (singer) and transcribed by Arden Ogg for the Cree Literacy Network.
These trails weave through Sedona, where dawn’s light sparks wonder. If the desert is far from you right now, find a quiet hill, park, or open sky in your hometown—or wherever you stand—to greet the sunrise and someone else’s sunset. Let any place become your altar for remembering: you are the spark that never fades.
“The Earth Turning”
Trail Description A short 0.3 mile paved loop atop Airport Mesa offers panoramic views over Sedona. While often busy before sunset, the overlook settles into stillness as dawn arrives.
Sunrise Appeal Here the horizon turns in every direction—red rock silhouettes awaken with first light while the first city lights fade below. Dawn lingers, reminding us that change is not loss but return.
Trail Details Difficulty: Easy / Elevation gain: ~50 ft (15 m) / Time: ~20 min / Parking: Airport Mesa lot; Red Rock Pass required
Scenic Reflection This mesa is where the day awakens—red stone wrapped in gold, then purple, then full light. You are not watching light arrive—you are watching its transformation. Shadows shorten, but they do not erase. They reform. What was hidden becomes visible. What was silent begins to glow. The land does not wait for dawn—it reveals another face. And so do you.
Trail Walking Meditation This light is not arriving. It is being revealed. This beginning is not starting—it is emerging. Stand still. Let yourself dissolve and reform. You are here. Just in new light.
MEDITATION 1: THE EARTH TURNING Practice this meditation at Airport Mesa as the sun rises
Have a seat at the campfire, wonder junkie. Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. The six directions emerge from your heart. Front – back Left – right Top – bottom They converge at the 7th: your heart. You are here.
Watching the sunrise on the red rocks. Now watch, experience, feel it this way. The earth turning consciousness. Because once you see it… you can’t unsee it.
Somewhere, as you watch the sunrise, the Earth is rolling — slowly, silently — toward the Sun, pulling your sky into light, painting it with fire. We call it our sunrise.
And somewhere else, at that same moment, another person is standing in the hush of evening, watching the sunset, as the Earth rolls them away from the Sun — into darkness, into starlight, into rest.
We are always turning.
Far to the North, at what we’ve called the top of the world, the Earth tilts just so — and the Sun does not set. It circles 360 degrees overhead in slow, glowing loops. A never-ending sunrise. A day without night. There, the Moon slips into silence. And the stars do not rise and set either — they travel that same circle, counterclockwise, around the sky.
Far to the South, at what we’ve called the bottom of the world, the Earth leans away — and the Sun does not rise. Darkness settles in. And the Moon begins its lantern-loop — a wide, slow orbit 360 degrees a circle as well, but here the stars circle clockwise above.
And so it goes. The Earth rolls. The sky shifts. Sunrise becomes sunset — and happens at the same time, in the same breath you are breathing right now. Sunset becomes sunrise — and happens at the same time, in the same breath you are breathing right now.
And always, somewhere, the Moon does the same. As the Sun tucks below one horizon and rises above another, the Moon follows its own quiet arc — always ascending, always descending.
When you stand at the edge of morning, watching the Moon fade into daylight, someone else, in that same breath, is watching the Moon rise — bright against their darkening horizon.
You bid the Moon farewell as they greet its rising. They welcome its silver as you watch it pale. And though your skies are different — though you stand in light and they stand in darkness — you are both watching the same Moon no matter the time of day. One pale in the daytime blue. One silver against the black sky. Breathing in. Breathing out. Together. The same moment. The same Earth. The same breath. A rhythm shared across the turning world.
And though it is the same Moon, it doesn’t always look the same. In Australia, the Moon appears upside down, compared to here in Sedona, AZ. At the equator, it tilts sideways — cradling the sky like a bowl. In the United States, it rises upright. Same Moon. Different eyes. Shaped by where you stand on this spinning Earth.
Even when you cannot see it, the Moon is rising for someone, somewhere — tilted, upside down, or cradled. A quiet tether. A continuous unfolding. The rhythm of light and shadow weaving all of us together.
The Practice: When you watch a sunrise: Stop calling it “the sun coming up.” Feel the Earth rolling you toward the light. Say quietly: “I am turning with everyone.” When you feel alone: Remember—someone is watching the sunset in the same breath you greet the dawn. You are both turning. Together. Breathe out.
“The Fire and the First Light”
Trail Description A 2 mile round-trip trail climbing ~430 ft to a broad mesa-top plateau. Less crowded than nearby Bear Mountain, it offers solitude at dawn and a sweeping stage for light across red stone country.
Sunrise Appeal The flat summit opens 360° in every direction, catching first light as it spills across Courthouse Butte, Boynton Canyon, and the mesas beyond. The rising sun turns the plateau into a sanctuary of fire and silence.
Trail Details Difficulty: Easy–Moderate / Elevation gain: ~430 ft (131 m) / Time: ~60–90 min / Parking: Doe Mountain Trailhead (Boynton Pass Rd); Red Rock Pass required
Scenic Reflection This mountain does not ask you to climb—it invites you to rise. The flat mesa is a table set for sky, and the fire in the east stirs like the breath of ancestors waking. You arrive not at a summit, but at a memory—of light warming your chest, of silence deep enough to speak your name. All around you, shadows flee and fire comes gentle. You are lifted not because you conquered the trail, but because the trail lifted you. And in that lifting, you remember what it means to stand sacred and whole.
Trail Walking Meditation The mesa is an altar. The sun is an ancestor. You are the flame waking again in a new form. Stand here and remember: you are sunlight, set loose. You are the match. You are the spark.
MEDITATION 2: “The Fire and the First Light” Practice this meditation on the mesa at dawn
There’s a Hawaiian saying: He Wa’a, He Honua – The Earth is Our Canoe. Buckminster Fuller put it another way: We are all crew members on Spaceship Earth.
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. The six directions emerge from your heart. Front – back Left – right Top – bottom They converge at the 7th: your heart. You are here.
Stand outside and look up. The stars you see rising from the edge of the world where you are are also rising and leaving for someone else at that same moment, even if those stars are nowhere in your sky right now. A star sitting high above your head is just lifting off the ground for someone else, and slipping away for another.
Walk far north, all the way to the top of the world. There, the stars never rise or set. They turn in wide, slow circles, round and round the sky, never crossing the horizon at all.
Travel south, to the bottom of the world. The same thing happens there — but the stars turn the opposite way.
Stand in Joshua Tree. Find a constellation and remember its shape. Now stand in Sydney, Australia. Look up at that same group of stars. It is the same picture — but upside down, and reversed.
The Moon does this too. The bright curve you see is not the bright curve someone else sees. People standing on the other side of Earth see the Moon lit the other way.
There is no single “right” way up in the sky. The sky changes with where your feet are.
Imagine a big hoop drawn all the way around the edge of the sky. Every star touches that hoop in its own place when it rises and when it leaves. Those places are different everywhere on Earth, but they can be followed, marked, and known — like hours on a clock.
Some stars never rise where you live. They stay hidden below your horizon forever. Other stars never leave your sky at all.
And very slowly — slower than a lifetime — the whole sky shifts, just a little, in a way people have watched and measured for thousands of years.
Nothing here is rushed. Nothing is random.
Everyone shares the same sky, but no one stands in the same place beneath it. Every time you look up, someone is greeting the stars you are losing, someone is losing the stars you are greeting. Same moment. Same sky. Same breath. The dance of rising and leaving never stops — only your place in the circle changes.
So every time you look up, you are seeing a sky shaped just for you — by where you stand and when you breathe.
The Practice: Find one constellation you recognize. Notice where it rises, where it sets, from where you stand. Remember: someone else sees it upside down. Let this teach you: There is no single “right” perspective. The sky is shaped by where your feet are. Breathe out.
“The Place That Knows Your Name”
Trail Description A quiet spur off the 2.6 mile Fay Canyon Trail leads to an east-facing stone ledge hidden among towering red cliffs. Less visited than the main trail, it offers one of Sedona’s most peaceful sunrise sanctuaries.
Sunrise Appeal This natural alcove catches the first light of morning. Shadows withdraw, and the walls glow warm with silence. The ledge itself becomes a vessel for belonging—a still chamber where presence deepens.
Trail Details Difficulty: Easy with short scramble / Elevation gain: ~400 ft (122 m) / Time: ~75 min / Parking: Fay Canyon Trailhead (Boynton Pass Rd); Red Rock Pass required
Scenic Reflection This canyon holds its breath until the light arrives. And then it exhales—not in sound, but in warmth and color. The ledge does not shout. It welcomes. The rocks do not move. They listen. You come not to conquer, but to be still. To be remembered. The land does not need your story—it already knows it. This place knows your shape before you step foot here. You are not lost. You are not found. You are recognized. And in that recognition, you begin again.
Trail Walking Meditation This ledge knows your name. The rock does not ask who you are—it remembers. Pause. Breathe. Let the canyon speak its rhythm. The place is not new. You are just hearing it again.
MEDITATION 3: LIGHT LEAVES NO TRACE Practice this meditation in the alcove as first light touches the walls
Practice this meditation in the alcove as first light touches the walls
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. The six directions emerge from your heart. Front – back. Left – right. Top – bottom. They converge at the 7th: your heart. You are here.
The light of the sun, the moon, or the stars on your face leaves no trace it was ever there — but the after-effects of the light being there remain visible forever.
Photons do not turn back. They carry every human moment outward, forever.
My father is 84 now. The light of him at 58 — whatever he was doing 26 years ago — is arriving at Vega right now. In approximately 500 years, his birth will arrive at Betelgeuse: that first breath, that first cry, washing over a dying star.
He is not a single point moving through time. He is an expanding sphere of all his moments, radiating outward. Toddler and father and grandfather, all expressing at once, in different regions of space, forever.
And so is everyone you have ever loved.
Every person who has ever lived is an expanding sphere of light, every moment of their existence propagating outward simultaneously, forever. The universe doesn’t let anyone go. It keeps everyone — at every age, in every moment — expressing eternally at different distances.
We think of the past as gone. It isn’t gone. It’s just farther away, still traveling, still real, still happening somewhere.
His light will leave no trace here on Earth. But it will never not exist.
The body lets awareness be seen the way a tree lets sunlight be seen — but the light was never the tree. You are not the tree. You are the sunlight passing through it.
Life is how awareness becomes visible. Death is when it no longer needs to be.
The Practice: When you grieve someone — look up at the stars. Know that the light of their life is still traveling. Somewhere out there, they are still taking their first steps. The universe doesn’t let anyone go. Breathe them in. They are still expressing. Breathe out. Nothing meaningful is lost — only the way it was seen.
Zuni Sunset Song Pronunciation: ZOO-nee SUN-set SONG This traditional hymn of the Zuni people captures the sacred beauty of sunset, a time of transition when the sky paints the desert in vibrant hues. Performed on Native American flute, the song evokes gratitude for the day’s end and the harmony of the natural world. Its soulful melodies reflect the Zuni’s deep spiritual connection to the land and cosmos, making it a profound expression of reverence and balance. Source: Shared through Zuni musical traditions. Readers are encouraged to seek Zuni elders or cultural knowledge holders for authentic performances and teachings.
These paths cradle Sedona’s red rocks, where the land exhales into starlight. If the desert is distant from you now, seek a rooftop, field, or shoreline in your hometown—or wherever you find yourself—to witness the sunset and someone else’s sunrise. Let every horizon remind you: you are changing clothes, but never lost.
Winter came to the desert the way it always did — without apology, and all at once. Roeweena came back. The fire was lower than her grandfather would once have allowed. He sat more carefully now, the oak pipe he had been chiseling — nearly finished now — across his knees next to his bag of sage, lowering himself onto the flat stone as though sitting had become a decision that required attention, but he still had two rootbeer floats next to him like so many fires before.
The cold was sharp enough to make every breath visible.
Hers vanished quickly.
His lingered, his old hoodie now baggy and worn with the faded inscription “The greatest game of hide n seek ever played”
Above them, Orion stood over the desert.
When she was little, she had asked why stars twinkled, and he had told her they were waving because they were happy to have finally arrived.
She had laughed then.
Tonight she did not laugh.
“What if kindness gets you hurt?” she asked.
He did not answer at once.
Somewhere down the trail, somebody laughed too loudly at something small, and the sound moved through her like the aftertouch of an older sting.
Not one wound. Several.
Enough of them that the question no longer felt entirely like a question. It had started hardening into belief.
“You’re ready for the winter story,” he said quietly.
She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and followed his gaze.
“You see him?”
“Orion.”
“Look again before I tell you what to see.”
She did.
Below him, Eridanus trailed off into darkness like a river of dim light.
“A scorpion had fallen into the river,” he said.
His voice sounded different now. Not performing. Remembering.
“Small body. Fast panic. Its legs fought the current like tiny oars — slipping, failing, trying again. Its tail high. Not anger. Older than anger.”
Roeweena kept her eyes on Orion.
Walking nearby was Orion himself. Not hunting. Just walking.
He pointed toward Sirius.
“Beside him moved his dog, close and quiet, whose heart is Sirius — the brightest star in the winter sky. The dog said nothing. It simply stayed.”
The fire snapped.
“Orion reached into the water with his left hand and lifted the scorpion out.”
As he said it, he raised his own left hand slightly, and she noticed how carefully his fingers opened now.
“For a moment it was still.”
He paused there.
“And then it struck.”
She looked down at her own hand.
“The sting was a needle of fire. Pain spread through his hand like heat beneath the skin — the physical feeling of betrayal.”
His fingers closed and opened once against the pipe.
“The scorpion fell back into the river.”
A silence held.
“Nearby, the hare had seen everything. He laughed.”
Her grandfather gave a small, dry smile without amusement.
“‘Well,’ said the hare. ‘That went well.'”
Across the bank, the bull lifted his head.
“‘Why would you do that?'”
Her grandfather kept his eyes on Orion.
“Orion looked at his wounded hand and watched the blood gather there.”
“The scorpion was still drowning,” Roeweena said.
He glanced at her once. “Yes.”
There was something in the way he said it that made her think she had heard some shard of this story long ago, beside some older fire, before she had enough life in her to understand why the scorpion mattered.
He turned back to the sky.
He reached down again.
The hare jumped backward.
“‘Stop. It will sting you again.'”
But Orion lifted it out once more and placed it on a dry stone.
“And again,” he said, “it stung him.”
The hare laughed louder, but fear had entered the sound.
The bull stepped closer.
“‘You can see what it is. It hurts you, and you still help it.'”
Orion looked at his hand. Exhaled once. Lifted his eyes.
“‘Stinging is the scorpion’s nature.'”
He turned to her and raised his left hand.
“Raise yours.”
She did.
“Now look at Orion again. See the three stars in a row?”
“The belt.”
“Not tonight. Tonight they are his wrist.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“The stars below become the thumb. Rigel becomes the tip of one finger.”
Her breath caught.
“It’s a hand.”
“The left hand,” he said. “The hand he reaches with.”
He pointed lower, toward the pale blur in the sword.
“And that nebula there — imagine it as the wound. The blood from the sting.”
She stared at the cloud of light.
“So that’s what I’m seeing there, isn’t it? The hurt made visible. Even the blood turned into something the sky could hold.”
The fire shifted.
Somewhere in the canyon a bird called once and stopped.
“Look again,” he said at last. “Same stars. New pattern.”
He traced slowly through the dark.
“Bellatrix and Saiph become pincers. The belt becomes the body. The hanging stars become the tail.”
She followed the pattern until it appeared.
“The hand…”
“…is the scorpion.”
Neither of them spoke.
The thing that stings Orion, she realized, is made from the same stars as the hand that reaches.
“That’s the hard part, isn’t it? The very thing that hurts him is made from the same stars as the hand reaching out.”
She lowered her hand only halfway.
“What stings us,” she said, “is often what we reach with.”
He looked at her. “Yes.”
“Even the wound becomes part of the light.”
A single nod.
He turned back to the story.
“‘Stinging is the scorpion’s nature,’ Orion said. ‘Helping is mine.'”
“‘Do not kill the kindness in your heart… just because the world has teeth.'”
The bull lowered his head.
“‘Then your nature is weakness.'”
Her grandfather’s voice hardened slightly here.
“‘No. If I let what it is decide what I am, then I’ve handed it too much. And if something small and frightened can turn me away from my own nature, then I was never very steady to begin with.'”
The words settled into the cold around them.
“The scorpion crawled away,” her grandfather said. “Not transformed. Not grateful. Just alive.” The hare sat very still after that. It did not laugh again. A quieter voice spoke then — the ram, who had stood apart and watched the whole time.
“‘But what if it always stings?'”
Her grandfather stopped.
Roeweena turned toward him. His oak pipe lay across both hands now. His breath moved pale between them.
When he spoke again, she had to lean in.
“Orion was quiet for a while.”
He looked down toward Eridanus, the river flowing away below Orion’s foot.
“‘Then it will live as a scorpion,’ he said. ‘And I will live as a man.'”
The fire cracked softly.
“‘The world has teeth. Many things in it will bite you without meaning to.'”
His voice dropped lower still.
“‘The world can bite, yes. You learn that soon enough. But don’t let that teach you to tear out the good in your own heart.'”
For a while, the only thing either of them added to the night was breath.
He lifted one hand and gestured across the winter sky.
“They did not go home,” he said. “The sky kept them.”
“The dog remained beside the one who reached. Loyalty became light. Taurus held its old suspicion — the part that thinks strength must always harden. Lepus stayed low, quick to laugh from a safer distance. Mockery is often just fear wearing a disguise. Aries kept watch.”
Roeweena looked from one constellation to the next.
“They’re not only pictures people drew in the stars. They’re ways a person can be.” “And we will be each one” he said She rubbed her thumb across the base of her fingers, still studying her raised hand.
“We all take turns being each of them,” she said.
The fire sank lower.
She lifted her arm again and matched her wrist to Orion’s belt, her thumb to the hanging stars, her finger to Rigel.
“The scorpion lives in the hand,” her grandfather said.
She looked at her open palm.
“You can’t reach without risk.”
He looked at her hand. “That’s the bargain.”
“You can’t help without being hurt.”
He said nothing.
“A closed hand feels safer,” Roeweena said.
“For a while, maybe,” her grandfather said. “But you can’t hold much with it. Can’t touch much either.”
The stars had already answered.
After a while he looked up once more at Orion and asked the question as if it were not his invention at all, only something he had finally heard clearly.
“So the winter sky asks one thing.”
She waited.
“Will you reach anyway?”
Far off, a voice sounded in the canyon and faded.
Roeweena kept her hand open.
She looked at Orion. At the nebula. At Sirius and Taurus and Lepus and Aries, each one holding its place.
Then she put that same hand over her heart.
For a long time she said nothing.
At last: “The hand.”
Her grandfather looked at her in the firelight, his face older and tired than she could quite bear.
When he answered, he did so softly enough that she had to lean closer.
“Then the sky has told you true.”
She lifted her eyes again to Orion above the desert.
Still there with the hand out. Still marked by what it cost to reach.
“Empty the Bowl of Light”
Trail Description A 0.5 mile spur off the Soldier Pass Trail leads to a series of ancient water-carved pools in red sandstone. Intimate and sacred at dusk, the pools gather sky in still reflection.
Sunset Appeal As daylight fades, each pool becomes a vessel of light—mirroring the sky’s last colors before surrendering them back.
Trail Details Difficulty: Easy / Elevation gain: ~100 ft (30 m) / Time: ~45 min / Parking: Soldier Pass lot; Red Rock Pass required
Scenic Reflection These pools do not speak, and yet they say everything. Still water receives the last light of the day, holding it only long enough to let it go. You kneel not to take, but to witness. The world empties itself here—quietly, without regret. This is not a place to keep. It is a place to release. The pools remain still, yet never empty. They remember only by letting go.
Trail Walking Meditation Let the bowl of light empty. Let it reflect you back to yourself. You are not here to hold the sky. You are here to offer it back. Be the bowl. Be the letting go.
MEDITATION 4: THE THREE QUESTIONS Practice this meditation at the Seven Sacred Pools as twilight settles
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. The six directions emerge from your heart. Front – back. Left – right. Top – bottom. They converge at the 7th: your heart. You are here.
Under a sky of cold starlight, I finally stopped searching. I breathed into my heart. From that simple, terrifying act — accepting exactly this moment, this body, this existence — three answers rose:
Where am I? Here. Not a coordinate. A presence. What am I? Light. Not symbolically. Literally. Stardust arranged just long enough to wonder. Who am I? Awareness emerging from the mystery. The universe noticing itself through a pair of eyes.
I learned this first in a snow cave, alone, watching Vega low on the horizon while a pan of ice melted over a small fire. The ice didn’t melt in one direction. It melted everywhere at once — up as steam, down as water, outward to the edges of the pan. The center emerging in all six directions simultaneously. I looked up at Vega and saw the same thing. Light leaving that star in every direction, some of it reaching my eye, most of it going elsewhere. Everything pouring outward from a single point. I have never forgotten it.
Now look around you.
You’re not in a snow cave. You’re beside the Seven Sacred Pools, carved in red sandstone. Twilight settling. Stars beginning to appear.
Before you reach for meaning — touch the water.
Reach down. Let your fingertips break the surface of the nearest pool. Feel its temperature. Cool. Not cold. The day’s warmth still held just beneath the skin of it — the way the stone beside you still holds the sun’s heat hours after the sun has gone.
Pull your hand back. Watch the surface resettle. Watch it become glass again.
The pool holds the sky now. The first stars. Your own face looking back at you. The pool doesn’t try to hold these things. It simply receives — and reflects. This is what stillness does. It doesn’t grab. It shows.
Pick up a pebble. Feel its weight — tiny, almost nothing. Drop it into the center of the pool.
Watch.
The ripples move outward in every direction at once. Not choosing north. Not choosing south. Every direction. All at once. From one point of contact, the entire surface responds.
The center emerges in all six directions at once.
The pool does what the ice did. What the star does. What you do.
Wait for the ripples to fade. Watch the pool return to stillness. The pebble is gone — resting on the bottom now, invisible. But the surface remembers. For a moment, the whole pool knew something had arrived.
Place your hand on the warm stone beside the pool. Feel the heat still held from the day’s sun. That warmth is radiating outward in every direction. All at once.
The center does not hold still. It pours itself outward in all directions. Ice becomes water becomes steam becomes rain. Light becomes warmth becomes life becomes light again.
You are not separate from this. You are not witnessing it from outside. You are the center, emerging.
Everything moves outward from here. Everything returns to here. The circle has no beginning. The circle has no end. And you — you are standing in it now.
The Practice: When you feel lost — stop searching outside yourself. Breathe into your heart. Establish HERE. Feel the six directions arise. Watch how the world re-enters relationship the moment you stop being a coordinate and become an origin. When you feel stuck — look at something melting. Notice it doesn’t melt in one direction. That’s you. Not contained. Emerging from your center in all six directions. When the thoughts come too fast — drop a pebble into still water. Watch the ripples move outward and fade. The pool returns to stillness. It always returns. So do you.
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. Breathe out.
You are not going somewhere. You are not coming from somewhere. You are here. Pouring outward. Becoming what you cannot yet know.
The center holds nothing. The center gives everything away. And still — somehow — remains full.
“The Fire Beneath the Fire”
Trail Description An easy 0.7 mile round-trip walk over open slickrock, with only ~80 ft gain. Wide sandstone slabs and west-facing views of Cathedral Rock make this a quiet sanctuary at dusk.
Sunset Appeal Perfect alignment of fire-lit sandstone and lengthening shadows. A natural altar for reflecting on change and continuity.
Trail Details Difficulty: Easy / Elevation gain: ~80 ft (24 m) / Time: ~30–45 min / Parking: End of Cathedral Vista Road; Red Rock Pass required
Scenic Reflection The land lies open here, smooth and strong like the back of a giant hand. As the sun lowers, fire spills across the stone like memory—old, slow, sacred. You do not rush this walk. You let it happen. The rock receives your weight. The light sees your shape. This is not the end of day; this is a passing of the torch. A promise whispered through color. You were never meant to keep the flame. Only to carry it forward, glowing and alive.
Trail Walking Meditation The fire has not gone out. It simply changed hands—and now it’s yours to tend. As the light retreats, remember: you are the hearth. You are the breath. You are the return.
MEDITATION 5: THE BREATH WE SHARE Iwígara — No One Breathes Alone Practice this meditation on the slickrock as darkness settles
Before you place your hand on your heart, find a tree.
Any tree. The juniper beside the trail. The piñon holding its shape against the last light. Whatever is near and has been here longer than this moment.
Look at it.
You see a right side, a left side, a front, a top, a bottom. You know there is a back side even if you cannot see it. But none of those sides belong to the tree by itself. They are relationships between the tree and your here.
Left, right, front, and back change when you move. The names change, but the action remains the same. All sides never end if you continue to follow the direction they represent. They will never return and never stop heading in that direction. Top and bottom feel more fixed because gravity gives us a shared agreement. The ground stays below. The sky stays above. So we treat top and bottom as constant. But even they are relative. In orbit, they would dissolve too.
The tree does not have a front. You give it one by standing near it.
The tree releases oxygen. You release carbon dioxide. What moves through one moves through the other.
One together.
So the boundary is not as solid as it seems. The skin feels like a border, but it is more like a temporary outline. You are not sealed off from the tree. You are in exchange with it.
The tree is made up of the same elements that make up you, and all elements come from the stars, so you are one together in that sense as well. What happens to the tree happens to you and vice versa.
The tree responds to light, drought, injury, season, and soil. Whether that is awareness in the way you mean awareness, no one knows. But if you force the tree’s way of being into your way of understanding, you lose something in translation.
And if the heartbeat establishes your living here — if the pulse is what makes location real, if all directions radiate from that beating center — then perhaps the tree has something similar. Not a heart like yours. Not one single beating organ. But a distributed pulse: sap rising, water moving, leaves opening to light, the whole tree answering the day.
Your heartbeat is a fast pulse. The tree lives by a slower pulse.
And for a moment, standing here together, you are both beating in the same place.
Now place your hand on your heart.
Breathe in.
The six directions emerge from your heart. Front — back. Left — right. Top — bottom. They converge at the 7th: your heart.
You are here.
Right now, as you breathe, you are inhaling atoms that once passed through the lungs of everyone who has ever lived. Not symbolically. Literally.
The Rarámuri people of northern Mexico call this iwígara — the sacred recognition that all things are related and share breath. No one breathes alone. No one ever has.
Argon-40 makes up about 1% of the air you breathe. It does not bond with other elements. It does not break down. It simply circulates — through lungs, through atmosphere, through time. The same atoms, cycling for billions of years.
This means the breath filling your lungs right now has passed through and been inside your relatives, your friends, your enemies, famous people, sacred religious figures who walked the earth, and countless people you have never heard of and will never know.
The person you lost whose absence still catches you off guard on quiet mornings — they are not gone from the air. They are in it. They are in you. Right now. In this breath.
Breathe out.
The breath you just released will travel. It will be breathed by a stranger you will never meet, who will carry a part of you forward into a moment you will never see.
Your breath is not private. It is not yours alone to keep.
Breathe in.
You don’t have to believe it. You’re already in it.
Breathe out. The ancestors are not gone. They are in your lungs. The people you have loved and lost are not absent. They are in every breath.
Not the same breath. Not another breath. Continuous. Unbroken. Shared.
The Practice: When you feel alone — breathe in and remember you are breathing ancestors. Breathe out and know you are giving breath to the future. When you grieve — breathe in, they are here. Breathe out, you are sending them forward. When you forget you belong — breathe in, iwígara. Breathe out, you are woven into everything.
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. Breathe out.
You are not a separate self breathing alone. You are a thread in the breathing of the world.
Mitakuye Oyasin. All my relations. Iwígara. We share the same breath.
nacha so nacha añño — “Not the same, and yet not another.”
“The Center Emerging”
Trail Description A 1 mile round-trip trail with ~300 ft of elevation gain, climbing gently to a red rock summit. Tucked close to town yet offering wide horizons, this peaceful sunset location offers solitude as day transitions to night. From the top, Coffee Pot Rock, Chimney Rock, and Courthouse Butte glow with last light.
Sunset Appeal The summit opens to the west, offering views of the sun’s descent behind Sedona’s western mesas. Twilight here feels less like an ending and more like a releasing—the day exhaling itself back into mystery.
Trail Details Difficulty: Easy to Moderate / Elevation gain: ~300 ft (≈90 m) / Time: ~45–60 min / Parking: Teacup/Sugarloaf Trailhead (Red Rock Pass required)
Scenic Reflection Here, the earth opens her palms to the west. Red sandstone releases the day’s warmth, juniper leans into stillness, and piñon scents the air like prayer. Sunset is not spectacle here—it is ceremony. You do not come to watch the sun leave. You come to feel the Earth turning you away from the light, into the embrace of stars.
Trail Walking Meditation Walk slowly. Let each step be an exhale. This is not ending—this is releasing. Feel the silence after light. The breath after speech. You are not here to hold on. You are here to remember how to let go.
MEDITATION 6: THE CENTER EMERGING Have a seat at the campfire, wonder junkie. Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. The six directions emerge from your heart. Front – back. Left – right. Top – bottom. They converge at the 7th: your heart. You are here.
But notice something: You did not go looking for the directions. They arose with you.
Front and back don’t exist until you arrive. Left and right don’t exist until you stand. Above and below don’t exist until you look.
The world is not around you. The world arises with you.
You are not lost. You are the center that makes directions possible.
Breathe out.
Now look out from this summit. Coffee Pot Rock. Chimney Rock. Courthouse Butte. Each one catching the last light — glowing warm against a sky already beginning to cool.
Watch the shadows.
Not quickly. Slowly. The way twilight asks you to.
See that shadow moving across Courthouse Butte? It’s not the rock changing. It’s the Earth turning. The rock stays. The shadow moves.
You are the rock. Your thoughts are the shadow.
Stay with the shadow for a moment. Watch it lengthen across the red face of the butte. Watch it climb. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t ask permission. It simply follows the Earth’s slow roll away from the Sun — the same turning you’ve been feeling since Trail 1.
Now notice something subtle — almost uncomfortable: awareness comes first. Thought comes second. Like a footprint after a step. Like a shadow after a rock.
A thought is a thing that already happened. Even if it appears right now.
Look at Coffee Pot Rock. Its shape hasn’t changed in the time you’ve been sitting here. But the light on it has. A minute ago it was amber. Now it’s copper. Soon it will be violet. The rock didn’t move. The light moved. And your thought about the rock? That moved too — always one step behind what the light was actually doing.
Breathe in.
Notice how quickly the mind makes a world. Thoughts about yourself. Thoughts about the six directions surrounding you. Thoughts about other people. Thoughts about what you think other people think about you. Thoughts about your thoughts about their thoughts.
A hall of mirrors.
And all of it is the immediate past. The only kind thought can ever be.
And without HERE — without awareness — there is no past and no future. There is only present.
Look at Chimney Rock. It doesn’t think about Courthouse Butte. It doesn’t compare itself to Coffee Pot. It doesn’t wonder what the sky thinks of it. It just stands — receiving light, releasing light, casting shadow, holding still.
It is HERE without effort.
So what are you, really?
You are the one who establishes HERE. And everything else follows.
Breathe out.
Look out from this summit one more time. See the wide horizons opening in all directions. See the day releasing itself into twilight without regret.
The shadows have moved since you began this meditation. The light has changed. Your thoughts have changed. But you — the one watching — haven’t gone anywhere.
The rock stayed. The shadow moved. You stayed. The thoughts moved.
This land knows how to complete cycles. It didn’t fight the sunset. It transformed with it. You can do the same.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
The Practice: When you feel lost in the hall of mirrors — place your hand on your heart. Say quietly: awareness first, thought second. Let the weather pass. Be the sky. When the thoughts won’t quiet — find a rock. Any rock. Watch its shadow move. The rock doesn’t chase the shadow. The rock doesn’t become the shadow. The rock stays. The shadow passes. You are the rock.
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. Breathe out.
You are not trying to control anything. You are remembering the only power you ever had: the power to establish HERE.
And from HERE — everything moves.
Something notices. The noticing is you.
You are not lost. You are here.
nacha so nacha añño — “Not the same, and yet not another.”
“Where the Stars Remember”
Trail Description Cathedral Rock stands as one of Sedona’s most iconic formations. While the full hike is challenging, the viewpoints at the base offer powerful sunset meditation spaces where red stone meets sky.
Sunset Appeal As the sun descends, Cathedral Rock becomes a silhouette of ancient knowing. The formation holds the last light like a vessel, then releases it to the stars.
Trail Details Difficulty: Easy (viewpoint) to Difficult (summit) / Elevation gain: Varies by route / Time: 20 min to 2+ hours / Parking: Cathedral Rock Trailhead; Red Rock Pass required
Scenic Reflection Cathedral Rock does not demand worship. It invites witness. As twilight deepens, the spires become doorways—not to somewhere else, but to here, more deeply. The rock remembers every sunset it has ever held. Every star that has wheeled overhead. Every person who has sat in its shadow and felt the Earth turn. You are not the first to wonder here. You will not be the last. But you are the only one standing here now, in this breath, in this light.
Trail Walking Meditation This rock is ancient. You are new. This rock is still. You are turning. This rock remembers. You are remembering. Stand in the space between memory and presence. You are both the observer and the observed. The rock holds you. The sky sees you. The fire never left. And the voice telling this story? It was always yours.
MEDITATION 7: THE SUN WE EAT Solar Bodies — How Light Becomes You Practice this meditation at the base of Cathedral Rock under the emerging stars
Have a seat at the campfire, wonder junkie. Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. The six directions emerge from your heart. Front – back Left – right Top – bottom They converge at the 7th: your heart. You are here.
Now place your other hand on your belly. The place where fire becomes flesh. The place where light becomes you. Breathe in.
Right now, your body is running on sunlight. Not metaphorically. Literally.
Every calorie you have ever eaten began as light leaving the Sun. Eight minutes from the Sun to Earth. Captured by a leaf. Stored as sugar.
Photosynthesis. The quiet miracle. A plant opens itself to the sky and light becomes food. Carbon dioxide becomes structure. Water becomes sweetness. The Sun is dismantled— photon by photon— and rewritten as leaf, stem, fruit, seed.
Breathe out.
When you eat a plant, you are eating sunlight that learned how to wait. When you eat an animal, you are eating sunlight that passed through muscle and bone before finding you.
There is no other source. No exception. All food is solar. All hunger is solar. All bodies are made of slowed-down light.
Breathe in.
Think of the last thing you ate. Bread. Fruit. Meat. Rice. Trace it backward. Grain to grass. Grass to leaf. Leaf to light. The Sun touched something green— and that touch became you.
Your warmth right now? Released photons. Your thoughts? Electrochemical reactions powered by sugars that were once light. Your heartbeat? Sunlight, spending itself.
Breathe out.
The ancients knew this without equations. They planted by the Sun. Harvested by the Sun. Stored the Sun for winter. They said prayers over food because they were eating a star.
Fire knew this too. The wood in the flames releases the same light it captured decades ago. The fire does not create energy. It frees it. Just like you do. Every movement you make today is light escaping its storage.
Breathe in.
Feel your body. Bones built from calcium drawn up by roots. Blood carrying iron forged in stars. Muscle contracting because sugar says yes. You are not made of Earth alone. You are made of sky that learned how to stay.
Breathe out.
The Sun feeds the plants. The plants feed the animals. The animals feed you. And one day, you will feed the plants again. Carbon returning to leaf. Nitrogen to soil. Minerals to root. The Sun will find you again— through grass, through grain, through something green. Not the same light. Not another light either.
Breathe in.
Place your hand back on your heart. The six directions emerge again. Front—what you are becoming. Back—what once fed you. Left—those who ate before you. Right—those who will eat after. Above—the Sun, still giving. Below—the soil, still receiving. And the 7th— here. Where light becomes life. Where eating becomes remembering.
Breathe out.
You are not separate from the food chain. You are not above it. You are not outside it. You are a temporary arrangement of sunlight and water and time. This is survival. This is fire recognizing fire.
The Practice: When you eat—anything— pause before the first bite. Place your hand on your heart. Then on your belly. Say quietly, if you wish: This is sunlight, learning my name. Chew slowly. Release the light. When you feel depleted: Step outside. Let the Sun touch your skin. Remember— it is already inside you. When you feel disconnected: Eat something grown from the ground. You are participating in a conversation older than language.
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. Breathe out. You are not consuming the world. You are borrowing light. And you will give it back.
nacha so nacha añño — “Not the same, and yet not another.”
They sat together in the hour before sunrise, Roeweena and her daughter Bethanore, beside a low campfire of oak, surrounded by sage bushes. The flames had mostly gone down now. What remained was the deeper part of fire — the red breath of coals, the soft settling of ash, the occasional whisper and snap from within the wood as if something hidden were still speaking in there. On the chiseling rock beside the fire, his chisel and his completed oak pipe and his others, the canoe, the rabbit, the bull, the ram and his dog, and the two rootbeer float mugs, lay where he had left them. She looked at the carvings for a moment, reached for the wolf trail around her neck but it was no longer there. Then up at the sky, then back. The same figures. Different material.
Then she picked up an orange and began to peel it, the skin coming away in one long spiral. The smell opened into the cold air — bright and sudden, startling against the oak smoke. She dropped the peel into the coals. It caught. A brief brightness. Then the coals received it.
Bethanore watched it go, her own orange held in both hands, her blanket pulled tight around her shoulders but not covering her favorite necklace. Above them, the eastern sky had not yet brightened, but it had begun to loosen. Orion was there on the rising side of the world, beginning again. And if you traced those same stars another way, as her grandfather once had, the dragonfly was there too — wings spread across the shoulders, body in the belt. Roeweena looked at the old pattern climbing out of darkness and felt the old ache and the old gratitude arrive together.
Beside her, Bethanore looked up. “Mama,” she said softly. “What are all those?” She meant the stars, but not all of them. Roeweena knew where her eyes had gone — the three in a row, the bright shoulder, the lifted hand, the old rising shape.
“Watch them,” Roeweena said. “What do they do?”
Bethanore was quiet a long time. The fire shifted. A coal fell inward. Above the low ridge of the eastern horizon, the stars kept climbing.
“They rise,” Bethanore said at last. “And then… they go.”
“Yes.” Roeweena folded her hands across her chest and looked up with her. “Keep watching.”
Another silence. Orion lifted a little more. The dragonfly lifted with him. A thin thread of smoke moved upward from the coals and disappeared into the dark.
“They don’t stay,” Bethanore said.
“No.” She handed Bethanore a section of orange. “What else rises and goes?”
Bethanore’s brow pulled together slightly. She chewed slowly. She did not answer right away, and Roeweena did not help her. She had learned that from him. Her grandfather had never hurried a true thing. He would wait with his palm on his knee, or bend and slide his fingers across a sage bush and bring them to his nose to smell them. The fire gave a small sound. Somewhere out in the dark a bird called once and stopped. Bethanore kept watching the rising stars.
“…Thoughts do,” she said finally, as though she were not inventing it so much as overhearing it.
Roeweena said nothing. Smoke moved between them and the stars and cleared.
“They just… come. And then they leave.” A pause. “Unless I follow them.”
“What happens when you follow one?”
Bethanore thought about this seriously. “It takes me somewhere. And then it’s hard to come back.”
“Yes.” The orange peel at the edge of the coals curled and darkened. “I do that a lot,” Bethanore said.
“We all do. That is the old habit.”
Bethanore rolled her head sideways. “So what do you do instead?”
Roeweena reached over with her fingers and slid them across the sage bush and gently breathed it in. She was letting the sky answer first. Orion kept rising. The dragonfly kept rising. The same stars. Another way of seeing.
“What do you do,” she said finally, “when you don’t follow a thought?”
Bethanore looked back up. Thinking. Really thinking. The red at the heart of the fire dimmed and brightened again.
“I just… watch it.”
“Yes.”
“From here.”
“Yes.”
Another of Orion’s dog stars cleared the horizon. They both watched without speaking.
“So I’m not the thought,” Bethanore said slowly.
Roeweena waited. The fire exhaled.
“I’m the…” The girl trailed off. Her eyes moved away from the stars and into the darkness between them — the vast, unhurried black that held every one of them without grasping any. She went very still. Her orange forgotten in her hands.
“Mama,” she said. “What is the dark part? Between the stars?”
Roeweena turned her head and looked at her daughter. Something moved through her — not surprise, but recognition. A door opening in a house she had once lived in and never entirely left. The fire. The hour before day. Orion lifting in the east. Her own grandfather breathing beside her in another cold. The smell of sage on his fingers. She had asked him that too. Those exact words.
A coal settled softly in the fire.
“I asked him that too,” Roeweena said softly.
Bethanore turned toward her. “What did he say?”
Roeweena shifted a little closer, the blanket brushing ash-dusted earth. “He leaned close — like this — and he said: the stars are many, but the darkness is greater. Thoughts are many, but the silence that sees them is greater. The thoughts move. The silence remains.”
Bethanore was very quiet. Above the hills, the dog stars had lifted clear.
Then, almost to herself, Bethanore said: “So I’m the dark part.”
Roeweena’s voice was barely above the sound of the earth. “That is exactly what I said.” A pause. “And that is exactly what he told me.” She looked back up at the sky. “He called it dadirri. Not that the thoughts vanish — but that you finally see what they are.”
The fire breathed.
“Beautiful. Passing. Not yours.”
Bethanore said the last words quietly to herself. Not yours.
“And because you no longer converse with every thought,” Roeweena said, “the mind begins to grow quiet by itself. Not forced. Not beaten into silence. Simply no longer fed.”
The earth held them. The fire held them. The stars of Orion held their old ascent.
“Then the one who watches becomes strong in the ancient way.” Roeweena’s voice was almost a whisper now. “He rests. She rests. They rest — in the great silence.” She took a slow breath and let it go. “That is what he shared with me. And now I share with you.”
They sat there a while longer, saying nothing. The eastern edge of the world had begun to pale, but the stars were still there, still climbing, still shining with that strange dignity things have when they are already on their way to disappearing. Bethanore peeled the rest of her orange slowly, the spiral of skin coming away in one long piece. She held it a moment. Then she laid it in the coals. The smoke lifted — thin and pale, carrying oak and orange into the bowl of the big dipper above.
At last Roeweena said, quietly, “Take a breath.”
Bethanore did.
“Hold it.”
She held it.
“The air in your lungs right now,” she said, “has been in other lungs. Not as a story. Literally. These atoms have moved through forests, through oceans, through animals, through cities, through children, through old people dying.” She paused. “Maybe through your great-grandfather. Maybe through someone born this morning on the other side of the world.”
Bethanore exhaled slowly. The breath came white in the cold, and for a moment it looked like smoke.
“The Rarámuri have a word for that,” Roeweena said. “Iwígara. The sacred sharedness of breath. Of life.”
Bethanore was quiet a moment. Then: “So when I breathe him in —”
“He is not gone,” Roeweena said. “He is moving.”
Roeweena looked down at the small urn beside her, the one she picked up earlier and had carried all the way here through the dark. Bethanore followed her gaze and said nothing. Roeweena set the urn in her lap and rested both hands on it for a moment before opening it. She had opened it once before, alone, and closed it again without doing anything. That had been three weeks ago. She had carried it since. Inside was what remained of her grandfather. No longer hand. No longer voice. And yet not gone. Moving.
The fire had burned low enough now that ash had gathered deep and soft at its center. Roeweena reached in with careful fingers and took a little of her grandfather’s ashes. Then she leaned forward and let them fall into the ashes of the fire, mumbling to herself “pick this up and put it over there.” Gray into gray. Bethanore watched without moving. Roeweena did it again. And again. Until the old ash and the new ash were no longer two things her eye could honestly separate.
The horizon was growing lighter now. Orion had risen higher into the paling east, and even as he rose, the first thinning of his brightness had begun. Rising again for the first time.
When the urn was empty, Roeweena set it down beside his chisel, beside his completed pipe, on the chiseling rock where he had left them. Then she took the small sage bush she had brought wrapped in cloth and set it in her lap. Bethanore looked from the plant to the ashes to her mother’s face.
Roeweena brushed away the stone ring of the fire one rock at a time. Then with both hands — hands that still carried the smell of orange — she rearranged the earth in the place where the coals had been and planted the sage there, into warmed soil and mingled ash. Her hands moved slowly. Not because she was uncertain, but because some acts ask to be done at the speed of truth. When it was in the ground, she pressed the earth around it and sat back.
The fire was gone. In its place: sage.
The first bird of morning called from somewhere beyond the wash.
Bethanore leaned forward. She only reached out and slid her fingers gently over the leaves of the sage bush. Then she brought them to her nose and smelled them. Exactly the way her great-grandfather used to.
Roeweena felt the breath leave her in a way that was almost laughter and almost grief and almost prayer.
Bethanore closed her eyes as she breathed in. Then she opened them. And suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, something moved. A flicker. A shimmer. She turned just enough to catch it without chasing it away. There, near the little sage bush, a dragonfly lifted into the new light — and was gone before she could be certain.
And half-hidden in the shadow at the base of the bush — a lizard. Watching her with one ancient eye. It held her gaze. Then it dropped. Rose. Dropped. Rose.
Bethanore stared at it. Then looked at her mother. Then back again. Roeweena followed her gaze and saw them too. Neither of them spoke. They did not need to.
Above them Orion was fading with the dawn, but not gone. Never gone. Only elsewhere in the turning, waiting to rise again. Below him, in the place where fire had been, the sage held the smell of earth and ash and orange and memory and morning.
Bethanore lifted her fingers to her nose once more and breathed in deeply.
One breath.
BACK TO BELL ROCK
Bethanore’s breath is still rising. The dragonfly is already gone. The lizard has returned to its shadow.
You have been here before.
At the beginning of this book, before the trails, before any of it made sense, you placed your hands on this rock. You felt the iron calling to the iron in your blood and didn’t yet know why.
Now you know.
Same rock. Different hands.
Nacha so nacha añño.
BELL ROCK “The Minerals We Are”
Trail Description Bell Rock rises from the high desert floor south of Sedona like a question answered in stone — a massive red sandstone butte whose shape the land spent 300 million years arriving at. It requires no summit. The base is the destination. You come here not to climb but to make contact. To place your hands flat against something that has been here longer than the concept of here.
Location & Timing Bell Rock is a stargazing and pre-dawn meditation site. Come after dark or before first light, when the butte rises black against the stars and Oak Creek can be heard below. This is the book’s final stop — a place to sit with everything you’ve carried through the seven trails and let it settle into the ground.
Trail Details Difficulty: Easy / Elevation gain: minimal / Time: as long as you need / Parking: Bell Rock Trailhead, Hwy 179; Red Rock Pass required
Scenic Reflection The rock doesn’t ask what you’ve learned. It doesn’t need the summary. It has been iron and sand and pressure and time, and it will be those things long after the questions you arrived with have dissolved into other questions. Sit against it. Feel the stored warmth of a thousand days in the stone at your back. Below, Oak Creek is writing its slow letter to the sea. Above, the same stars that held Roeweena and her grandfather and Bethanore are holding you now. You are not at the end of something. You are at the edge of the next beginning, which looks — from here — exactly like stillness.
Walking Meditation Walk slowly around the base. Let one hand trail against the rock. You are touching geology that once was dune, once was seabed, once was mountain. It became this by surviving what tried to unmake it. So did you. When you find the place that stops you — stop. Sit down. Press both palms flat. Begin.
MEDITATION: THE MINERALS WE ARE Practice this meditation at Bell Rock with Oak Creek flowing below
Have a seat at the campfire, wonder junkie. Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. The six directions emerge from your heart. Front – back Left – right Top – bottom They converge at the 7th: your heart. You are here.
Now place your other hand on the red rock beneath you.
Feel the iron in your blood calling to the iron in this stone. Not metaphorically. Literally. Both forged in the same stellar furnace, billions of years ago.
The red you see in these cliffs? Iron oxide. Rust. The same iron that carries oxygen through your arteries right now. When massive stars exploded—supernovas scattering their hearts across space—that iron became this sandstone. And that iron became you.
Pick up that cottonwood leaf beside you—brown, brittle, already returning. Feel its edges crumble between your fingers. This leaf was once air and sunlight. Now it’s becoming soil, releasing its minerals back to the stone, back to the creek. Watch it decompose in your palm. You are holding tomorrow’s red rock. You are holding yesterday’s tree. You are holding the conversation between earth and sky.
Listen to Oak Creek flowing below, carrying dissolved red rock toward the Colorado River, toward the Gulf of California, toward clouds that will become rain over mountains you’ll never see.
Now breathe deeper.
The dust in this breath—some of it traveled 5,000 miles from the Sahara Desert. Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic Ocean every summer, carrying iron and phosphorus that feeds the Amazon rainforest. The same dust that nourishes the lungs of the Earth now sits in yours.
You are breathing Africa. You are built from stellar explosions. You are temporary stone, walking on permanent stone, both of you cycling through Oak Creek’s endless conversation with the sky.
Now the orange in your pack—peel it here. Feel the spray of oils, the burst of citrus on the wind. This orange grew in sunlight, pulled minerals from soil, concentrated them into sweetness. Vitamin C that was once carbon dioxide. Sugars that were once photons.
Eat it slowly.
With each bite, you’re becoming the orange tree. The calcium in this fruit becomes your bones. The potassium becomes your heartbeat. The water becomes your blood. You don’t just eat the orange—you become continuous with it.
The tree’s roots once pulled iron from ancient soil. That iron flows through your arteries now. The tree breathed out oxygen. You breathe it in. The tree dropped leaves that became the soil that fed new trees that made this orange that makes you.
Feel it now:
The leaf in your hand returns to minerals, feeding the red rock that feeds the creek that feeds the sky. The orange returns to you. You will return to soil. The soil will return to trees. The trees will return to fruit. The fruit will return to future hands, future mouths, future wonder.
You are not separate from the leaf, the rock, the creek, the distant desert, the orange tree. You are all the same minerals, cycling. The same atoms, dancing. The same stardust, temporarily organized into wonder, wind, water, stone, sweetness.
Place both palms flat on Bell Rock.
You are geology becoming aware of itself. Sedona’s red sandstone, once ancient dunes, compressed into prayer. The minerals dreaming themselves awake through your eyes.
The iron in your blood once glowed in the core of a dying star. The dust in your lungs once swirled through Saharan dunes under the same constellations now wheeling overhead. The orange on your tongue once pulled sunlight through leaves on a tree whose roots touched groundwater that touched this very creek.
Place the crumbled leaf on the rock beside you.
You are not consuming the world. You are joining its circulation. Nothing separate. Everything cycling. All of it here, now, in you.
The Practice: When you eat anything: Pause before the first bite. Feel the minerals in the food calling to the minerals in your bones. When you see something decomposing: Touch it gently. You are witnessing your own future return. When you feel the wind: Know you are breathing the dust of distant continents, the breath of ancient forests, the exhalations of mountains wearing themselves down to feed the sea.
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe in. Breathe out.
You are not standing on the Earth. You are the Earth, standing.
nacha so nacha añño — “Not the same, and yet not another.”
Carnation Rein knew the signs. She put on the old sweatshirt, pulled the wolf trail from the drawer, grabbed her rootbeer float and went outside.
They were all there.
All seven.
The same order Akitsushima had stood under the night she pressed the sky into wood. The same order had come back around. She was standing here now, the darkness inside her, feeling lost, the wolf trail necklace in her hand, and the whole night laid out like something that had happened before and will again. Maybe that was exactly right. Maybe Akitsushima had stood under this same alignment on a night that was carving her too. You don’t press something that deep into wood from a comfortable place.
Her thumb found Mercury first. Quick. Silent. Close.
Then Venus. Feed what matters.
The moon. Return.
Mars. Patience. Long burn.
Jupiter. Guard what endures.
She held Saturn last, the farthest wolf, the slowest. Adapt together.
The sun — already gone below, but she knew where it was. Every role sacred.
She pressed her thumb flat against it and felt her own heartbeat move through the wood.
The seventh direction. Right here.
She put the necklace on and went to build the fire.
It had been dark inside. Not the house — the house was fine. The kind of darkness that sits inside you when you’re feeling lost both inside and out. She had learned what to do with that.
The fire spiral was where it always was. She gathered wood from the stack and crouched at the sage bushes, the way she always did — grandmother’s bush, the one closest to the fire, then her mother’s, just to the left — and stopped.
She did it again. Slower.
Her thumb was on one side. Her fingers on the other. Both sides at the same time. The whole leaf, right there, in one hand.
She stayed crouched, not sure what she was noticing exactly, only that she was noticing something.
She brought the leaves to her nose and breathed in — her minerals in the roots, drawing up into the stems, into the oils on the leaves, what had been her feeding what fed her — then breathed out into them the way the family always had. Both directions. Her breath going somewhere, the plant’s breath coming back. Neither one only giving. Neither one only receiving. The whole family still holding the circle.
She slid her fingers along the leaf again.
Both sides.
She looked toward the fire waiting to be built, then back at her hand.
Something was trying to form. She didn’t rush it.
When you are around the fire, she thought slowly, like she was trying to catch hold of something that kept slipping away, you are only ever seeing one side. Of the fire. And the fire is round. It goes all the way around. Whoever is across from you is seeing the part you can’t.
She looked at the leaf.
But this. You can hold this.
She wasn’t sure that was a thought yet. It felt more like something her hands had figured out before telling her.
She exhaled into the sage one more time and went to build the fire.
She built the fire the way she had been shown and sat down cross-legged in the center of it all — Moms necklace warm at her chest, the seven wolves against her skin, great grandfather’s inscription on the sweatshirt faded past reading in most light but she knew what it said and where to look the answers she seeked were hiding in plain sight.
She hadn’t planned to stay long. But she had built the fire anyway — the way you do when the night is big enough to need one, and somewhere between feeding it and forgetting herself she simply stopped. Stopped thinking about where she needed to be. Stopped rehearsing tomorrow.
The earth received the darkness inside her as it always does. She felt the lightness of herself returning, the solidity of the ground taking what she brought and transmuting it. The fire side of her face warmed immediately, the heat finding her cheekbone, her forearm, the backs of her hands resting on her knees. Behind her the night air sat cool against her neck and shoulders, the cold and the warmth arriving at the same moment from opposite directions.
She took a breath. And then something strange happened. She noticed that she had not decided to breathe. The breath had already begun by the time she noticed it. She tried to stop it, and for a moment she could. But then it came anyway, pressing through her like heat through the skin of the fire, like smoke finding its way through wood and flame and into the dark whether she approved of it or not.
She could choose. She had just chosen to hold her breath. But the choice was nested inside something larger that was not a choice at all. Breath kept arriving. It moved through her the way air moved through the coals, the way the fire leaned and answered what fed it.
It is as if I am being breathed, she thought.
And the fire made that feel less like a thought than a fact.
She felt her chest. Felt the beat there. Steady. Patient. She breathed into it deliberately, and something settled. Something said: you are here.
And here, she felt it suddenly, was enormous.
She looked left, past the tree line going dark. The firelight ran until it couldn’t, then the dark took over, but the land kept going. She looked right, over the slope of the hill. Same thing. The light stopped. The world did not. She looked up. Smoke rose through sparks into a sky thick with stars, and neither the smoke nor the sky seemed interested in ending where her eyes gave up.
Behind her, in front of her, below her in the earth, above her in the dark. No wall, no edge, no final thing.
And yet here she was. Not the center because she was important, but the center because her heart was beating. That beat was what made left and right mean anything. Front and back. Up and down. Without that pulse, the six surrounding directions would not gather anywhere. The fire had its center too, all the leaping and collapsing organized around a core of heat she could not look at directly for long.
Here was not a place she had walked to. It had arrived with her and it was inside her at the same time. Both with her and within her. The fire was like that too, present in this ring of stones, and also inside every piece of wood it had not yet touched.
The 360 degrees of land around her, country, and the 360 degrees of sky above, all of it arranged around one living beat.
In sky country, the Ojibwe call that old road Ma’iingan Miikana — the Wolf Trail — the path the Sun and the wandering lights follow across the heavens.
When the heart is not beating, she thought, watching an ember glow and dim, there is no here. Not like this.
She watched the fire and watched the fire and then noticed. She was watching the fire.
There was the fire. And there was the watching.
She was not the flame. But she was not entirely the watching either, because something in her had noticed the watching taking place. And when she tried to turn toward that, the one noticing, it slipped back again, the way flame folds behind flame, the way one layer of heat hides inside another, the way a coal can look dark and cool until breath reaches it and reveals what was burning there all along. No bottom to it. No final layer.
The fire was never still. She stared into it and tried to find one thing that was not moving, one edge of flame, one fixed shape, and there was nothing. Even the parts that looked still were changing. A log darkened, brightened, split, sagged inward. A coal went black, then orange, then nearly white, then black again.
And yet it held. Not exactly a shape, but enough of one that she kept calling it a fire.
Here resides never-ending movement, she thought. That is what here is made of.
She reached forward to feed a stick into it, felt the stretch across her shoulders as she leaned in, felt the heat increase against her face as she drew closer, and placed the wood. The fire received it. The wood hissing, grain turning red, then silver, then ash. The fire rose. Then the fire gave — heat into the air, light into her eyes, smoke into the dark, sparks climbing into the night. The air answered, leaning the flame, feeding one edge, starving another. The coal that had burned brightest an hour ago was gray and quiet now.
She watched a piece of wood lose its edges, lose its grain, lose the last thing that made it recognizable, and in losing all of that become the brightest part of the fire.
The sparks rose and she followed them up through the dark until she couldn’t tell them from the stars.
Everything surrounding this moment had arrived before she did. The wood had grown for years before tonight. The stones had been shaped by weather long before her hands touched them. Even the flame licking the newest stick had been hiding in other forms — in sun, in tree, in fiber, in dryness, in waiting.
The smoke reached her before the word for it did. The heat on her skin before the thought heat. The crackle before the idea of crackle.
Awareness arrived first. Naming came after.
Thoughts are the past, she realized. They arrive after the burning.
What had been tree became log. What had been log became flame. What had been flame became smoke, ash. Nothing disappeared. Everything moved outward, changed form, became the next thing it was always going to become.
And without here, this living center, this beat, there would be no past to notice emerging, and no future to imagine arriving. Only this flame, this breath, this moment.
Beside the fire sat unburned wood. The fire was not visible in it, but that did not mean it was absent. It was there as possibility. As stored sunlight. As structure waiting for meeting.
She looked at the unburned wood, then the ash, then the flame between them.
She fed the fire one last piece of wood and sat back and breathed. Down into her chest, into the beat at the center of all six directions. Into here.
The fire threw light on everything in front of her and shadow on everything behind it. A branch looked larger than it was. A stone took on a face, then lost it when the fire shifted.
She thought about what had been carving at her lately. The thing that felt like damage. She had been inside it long enough now to start wondering if damage was the only word for it. Michelangelo said the David was always in the marble. That his job was just to remove what wasn’t David. Every blow of the chisel looked like destruction. Every piece that fell away looked like loss. But he wasn’t taking anything. He was finding something. The thing that had always been there, waiting inside the stone, waiting for exactly this — the thing that felt like it was ruining everything.
She looked at the fire.
The wood lost its edges. Lost its grain. Lost the last thing that made it recognizable. And in losing all of that became the brightest part of the fire.
She watched the fire release, the way it had been doing all night. The wood let go of being wood. The flame let go of the wood. The heat let go into the air. Nothing in the fire gripped. And because of all that releasing, it was still here, still bright, the warmth of it still finding her face across the dark between them.
Her birthright was the same releasing. Not disappearing. Not giving up. Surrendering to here, the here she had established simply by breathing into her heart.
The fire was round, but no one around it could see the whole thing at once. The Sun was the same. The stars were the same — fires in the sky, each one seen from somewhere. What you see, you see. But you are always standing somewhere.
She looked at the flames and noticed she had never once seen one flame in full. Only the side facing her. Every flame kept half of itself turned away.
Like the moon. You never see it rise and set in the same moment. Always only the arc. Half the hula hoop.
Incomplete. Not as failure. As nature.
And impermanent. She had watched this fire for over an hour and it had not been the same fire for one consecutive second. Transformed. Released. Distributed.
And imperfect. The fire leaned where the air leaned it. Never just one thing — always flame and smoke and coal and ash and heat and dark, none of it finished, nothing only itself and nothing else.
Impermanent. Incomplete. Imperfect.
And because of that, undeniably alive.
She let out a long, slow breath.
She could feel it leave her. Could watch the smoke from the nearest flame leave with it. Both to the bowl of the big dipper in sky country above.
The sacred breath of all. Not hers. Moving through her.
The fire breathed with her. And the night held all of it.
Then — at the edge of the firelight, crouched in the sage.
One ancient eye. Watching.
It dropped. Rose. Dropped. Rose.
The lizard was doing push-ups. Watching.
She laughed.
Wherever you are right now — in Sedona or far from it — you have a quiet hill.
It may be a rooftop. A park bench. A patch of grass between buildings. A stretch of shore. A fire escape where the sky opens just enough.
You don’t need red rocks. You don’t need dark skies. You don’t need a telescope or a guide or any special equipment.
You just need to arrive. To stand still. To put your hand on your heart.
Find your quiet hill. Return to it often. Let the sky teach you what you already know.
Have a seat at the campfire, wonder junkie.
You are not separate. You are not lost. You are only changing clothes.
When you watch a movie you see the character with everything they ever dreamed of. What you don’t see is the washing dishes. When you see a famous golfer you see the fist pump. The trophy. The billion dollars. The most celebrated swing in the history of the game. What you don’t see is 27 surgeries. Pharmaceutical painkillers at 3am. A bodyguard outside the bathroom door. Never alone and completely alone at the same time. That’s the washing dishes of a life. The pick this up and put it over there. The fell down and got up and fell down again. The moments nobody frames. Nobody posts. Nobody buys a ticket to see. But they’re the moments that are actually lived. The sages have always known this. Before enlightenment, washing dishes. After enlightenment, washing dishes. The dishes don’t change. Something else does. And that something else can only be found in the ordinary unremarkable sacred dailiness of a life actually lived. Most author’s notes are the Instagram photo. Clean hands. Polished light. The résumé wearing a human face. These are the washing dishes. Five hundred nights under open sky. A boom pod at 35,000 feet. A phone booth during basic training. A snow cave in Alaska. A center field in little league. A mother reading clouds on her last evening. The sky has been holding these stories for a long time. Here they are.
Rising from Leaving
Campfire Stargazing Story: Polkadots Underwater
The colorful circles are painted on the ground and the walls all over the backyard like polkadots decorating everything surrounding the built-in pool at my Nana and Popup’s house.
I’ve been trying to learn how to swim by myself for the first time and nothing has worked after several visits to Popup’s pool until this time.
I’m in the pool in a safety ring listening to the adults quietly talk about this and that and I have this weird feeling of my heart beating in my chest and then a thought comes out of nowhere: raise your hands and drop in.
So I do.
Down under the water I open my eyes and I can see the adults—it looks like they’re coming towards the pool—and I see those polkadots on the wall. But what I notice most is I am really quiet but at the same time thoughts are running all over my mind.
And that’s when it hits me for the first time: I am not my thoughts. I am the watcher of those thoughts, like the wizard behind the curtain in Oz. And I don’t have to talk back to those thoughts that are just showing up. Weirder yet, I am not in control of those thoughts—they just happen about anything and everything all over the place.
But I—I am quietly behind the curtain looking at the polkadots, surrounded by water and silence.
Then I say to myself, behind those thoughts: kick your legs like they showed you. Move your arms like they showed you.
And suddenly I am swimming up towards the surface where the adults are kind of nervous, looking at me.
“What are you doing? When did you learn how to swim?”
“Under the water,” I respond. “It was quiet there and I could feel my heart beating so I knew where I was and what to do.”
“Quit joking around. Go back to the other end of the pool and play in the shallow end, Tony Baloney.”
Years later, I would learn this same lesson at 35,000 feet with a sextant in my hands. And decades after that, standing under the stars in Joshua Tree, I would finally understand what that little kid discovered beneath the polkadots:
You are not the thoughts. You are the one who hears them.
Campfire Stargazing Story: Center Field
The story that taught me everything—the moment when all five principles lived in a single act of grace, happened in Center Field during a baseball game.
When I was nine or ten years old, I played little league baseball. One afternoon during a game, I was stationed in center field when I had to pee so badly I just couldn’t wait. I convinced myself I could release just a little—just enough pressure to make it through the inning until I could reach the porta-potty by the dugouts.
I was completely wrong.
To my shock, surprise, and relief, I just couldn’t stop. I peed all over my uniform pants, standing there in center field, unable to do anything but let it happen.
Somehow my pops, watching from the stands, could see what was happening—or what had happened. I don’t know how he knew, but he knew.
When three outs finally came and we had to run in from the field back to the dugout, I faced what would surely be the most humiliating moment of my young life. The youngest boy on the big boy majors team, about to walk past teammates and parents with everyone seeing what I’d done.
Then my father appeared.
He came jogging off the stands in my direction, all casual and excited, like he wanted to congratulate me for how I’d played out there. When he got close enough, he suddenly tripped over his own two feet—something that had never happened. My pops was a very good athlete, graceful and sure-footed.
As he stumbled, his now-opened soft drink went flying and splashed all over me, I can still feel the cold liquid and ice on my skin.
I stood there, surprised and soaking, as he directed me over to the hose and began spraying me down with water to wash off the soda—and now I finally realized what he had done. He’d completely rinsed off and disguised what I had done. In one graceful, quick-thinking move, he transformed everything. By making a small fool of himself, he gave everyone else a different story to remember.
That was the day I grew up in the way I saw my old man.
Because what he did in those few seconds showed me everything I would spend the rest of my life learning to name:
He knew himself well enough to act without hesitation—understood exactly who he was and what mattered most.
He couldn’t control what had already happened, but he chose his response with complete clarity. Destiny dealt the hand; he chose how to play it with grace.
He accepted what was—no judgment, no panic, no wishing it different. He met the moment with love in action. When the problem remained, he offered more—his own dignity, freely given.
He stood where I couldn’t stand, saw what I couldn’t see. From his vantage point in those stands, he had perspective I didn’t have from center field. He saw the whole situation—every player, every parent, the looming embarrassment—and he saw it before I did.
And in that seeing, he remembered: we’re all connected. He’d been young once. Vulnerable once. He knew what shame felt like, and he refused to let me carry it alone.
My father surrendered his own dignity and chose mine instead. He walked through acceptance and stood shoulder to shoulder with a terrified kid who needed someone to change the story.
Now, decades later, when I look up at the summer sky and find the Northern Cross stretched across the Milky Way—that great arrow of destiny—and then search for tiny Sagitta, the arrow of choice, I am reminded of this story. It is written in the stars now, the way all our truest stories are. Handed down through constellations and campfires, through fathers and sons, through every act of love that refused to let shame have the final word.
That afternoon under the same sky that has witnessed every human moment since we first looked up, my father showed me what those two arrows mean when they rise together: we cannot choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we respond. We cannot control destiny, but we can navigate through it with grace.
Campfire Stargazing Stories: Otis’s House
It was the winter of my sixth grade year. I was walking up to my friend Otis’s house by myself—all my friends were already there. We’d just finished a Pop Warner tackle football game, and everybody was heading over to celebrate and swim in the pool.
When Otis opened the door, I caught it: everyone inside went from frozen-still-acting-natural to “Oh, it’s just Tony”—and then back to what they were doing. Drinking. Other stuff.
My senses fired off like I was back on the playing field: breathe through heart, find my center focus on where I am, observe what the center of the room is (glass coffee table beer wine paraphernalia), notice who the person of the center of that is (nameless), decide what that means and where I want to be in it—all of it happening instantly in the span of a single breath. I froze. My gut said clear as anything: This is not a place I want to be. This is not anything I want to do with.
It was strange. These were my friends. We weren’t that old. But I knew—without a shadow of doubt—this was not the place to be.
After the usual kids-being-kids jabbing, I turned around and walked away.
I didn’t realize that action would have repercussions for the rest of my life. It was a turning point. I never interacted with all those friends in that house again, not in any social way. And it started a pattern I’ve followed ever since.
Campfire Stargazing Story: The Horse That Taught Me How to Stargaze
Horses already know where they are—and they know where you are, too—when you look them in the eye, she said.
So I did. We stared at each other.
Then she said, He’s okay with you. You can ride together.
So I got on, like she said.
It was the first time I’d ever had the chance to ride a horse.
I sat tall, relaxed like she told me, and breathed easy.
Then we were moving.
We left the walking area and entered the open field.
“Sit heavy,” she called. “Tap his hips with your heels.”
Instantly, he dropped lower—his body elongating, stretching out like a rubberband and thrusting forward like a rocket.
I exhaled. I am not in control. Accept what’s happening. He knows what he’s doing.
And wham—we were off.
Hair in the wind, baseball cap gone.
It was like jumping off a rock into the ocean—the point of no return.
Along for the ride.
Look up. Accept what comes.
We were going where he wanted to go.
And then, it was over.
We slowed to a trot.
When she caught up, all she said was, He likes you.
How to Stargaze: Go outside. Look up. Exhale. Let go of what you think it is. Accept what comes. Choose your focus, even when the night feels silent. Breathe. You are part of the sky. The Mystery likes you.
Leaving from Rising
Campfire Stargazing Story: The Phone Booth
About a week into basic training, I was more lost than I’d ever been in my life.
Not lost like missing a turn or forgetting where you parked. Lost like—I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t hear myself think over all the yelling.
That’s the point of that first week. They break you down. Disorient you. Yell so loud you can’t hear your own thoughts. Make you so exhausted you let go of what you know and just follow orders.
And it was working. I was letting go. But I didn’t know what I was letting go into.
Then came the five-minute call home.
They lined us up—thirty recruits waiting for their turn in the phone booth. Five minutes. Let your family know you’re alive. That’s it.
I watched the guys ahead of me. Some came out smiling. Some came out crying. Some came out and you couldn’t tell anything had happened at all.
Then it was my turn.
I stepped into the phone booth and slid the door closed.
Suddenly—quiet. Not silence, but the chaos was muffled now. Behind glass. I could still see the drill sergeants yelling, but I couldn’t hear them anymore.
Blinding sunlight reflected off the glass right into my face. I couldn’t see clearly. Just brightness and shapes and the coins in my hand.
I breathed into my heart. Found my center. For the first time in seven days, I knew where I was. Right here. In this phone booth. With five minutes and three dollars.
The operator: “$3 please.”
I fed the coins in. Click. Click. Click.
Ringing.
Then her voice.
“Tony?”
And I lost it.
I mean completely. Giant exhale. Crying like a little child. Not quiet tears—loud, gasping sobs I couldn’t control even if I wanted to.
Through the glass, I could see the other recruits watching. Thirty guys staring at me breaking down in a phone booth.
I didn’t care.
I couldn’t control basic training. Couldn’t control the yelling or the exhaustion or the fear. Couldn’t make any of it different than it was.
But I could make this call. I could choose to hear her voice. I could let go of everything I’d been holding for seven days.
My mother just kept repeating: “Let it out, Tony. Let it out.”
Not it’s okay. Not be strong. Just—let it out.
So I did. I accepted what was happening. No judgment. No wishing it different. Just this moment, this phone booth, this crying I couldn’t stop and didn’t want to stop.
And when I thought I was done, when I thought I’d let it all out—she said it again. “Let it out.”
So I offered more. More tears. More release. More of what I’d been carrying that I didn’t even know was there.
Operator: “Thirty seconds.”
Mom: “I believe in you. And I love you.”
Me, barely able to speak: “I love you too, Mom. Thank you.”
Click.
I stepped out of that phone booth standing taller.
Peaceful. Focused. Everything was different but nothing had changed.
The drill sergeant was right there, yelling something I couldn’t make out. A week ago, that yelling would have been an arrow straight to my soul.
But now?
It was just wind.
My mother had stood where I couldn’t stand—outside the chaos, seeing what I couldn’t see from inside it. She could see I needed permission. She could see I was holding more than I knew.
And because she stood there, I could stand here—taller, clearer, breathing again.
Campfire Stargazing Story: Survival School
19 degrees outside. Crackling fire of Pine and smoke in the breeze. I can see my breath in the air.
I’m lying on a bed of branches inside a snow cave built for one – me, staring up through the opening at the star Vega on the horizon and the moon. The line between light and dark on the moon shows me roughly north and south as it has for everyone who has ever walked the earth. North is where we’re headed tomorrow.
I have a pan balanced over a small fire. Snow melting so I’ll have water to drink.
The ice doesn’t melt in one direction.
It melts everywhere at once.
Up—steam rising and leaving into the night air. Down—water pooling in the bottom of the pan. Outward—spreading to the edges, finding every direction the metal allows. The center emerges in all six directions at once.
I look up at Vega.
Same thing.
Light leaving that star in every direction. Some reaching my eye. Most going elsewhere. All of it pouring outward from a single point that happened roughly 26 years ago, I am looking at the past in the present moment interacting with it and creating the future.
And the light emerging from my body going towards Vega merging with other light, living forever in the sky and 26 years ago that light from me is arriving at Vega right now.
The ice. The star. Everything emerging from the center outward.
Both participating in keeping me alive tonight.
Steam rises from the pan and disappears into darkness. It doesn’t stay. Can’t stay. It drifts into air, into sky, and somewhere else—some other morning, some other moment—it returns.
Dew on grass. Rain on stone. Ice in someone else’s pan, melting over someone else’s fire.
Not the same water. Not another water either.
I look at the flames. The wood releasing the light that was captured from the sun the same way the sun itself does. The way every star the ancients traveled by does. Photons of light freed by heat, rushing outward in every direction—some crossing space for eight minutes to land here, warm my face, keep everything alive. The past again in the present moment.
The ancients knew this without knowing how. They built fires and looked up at the distant fires in the sky and called them kin.
I’m doing the same thing tonight.
Ice in my bones. Water in my blood. Breath rising as vapor.
Solid. Fluid. Gas.
All three at once.
Holding form, letting go, becoming what I can’t know yet—the way ice doesn’t know it will be steam, the way a star doesn’t know it may one day become part of a planet like earth.
Everything on its way to becoming something else. Everything was already something else before it is what it is now.
The rock ring I made around the fire looks like a hula hoop. No beginning. No end.
Just different places on the circle, all of them home. Just like me.
In the morning, these branches I’m sleeping on will become the morning fire.
The snow cave will melt.
Leaving no trace I was ever here. Except the chips on the rocks I used to make the hula hoop around fire.
And this—
This pattern emerging from the center flowing outward—
Everything on its way to becoming something else, was already here when I arrived and will be here when I leave but not the same,
And it too will leave no trace.
Campfire Stargazing Story: The Sextant A Conversation Between Who I Was Then and Who I Am Now
The air at 35,000 feet tastes like metal and cold. Frost creeps across the boom pod windows no matter how many times I wipe it away. The engines hum a note so constant it becomes silence. I press the sextant to the overhead glass, trying to catch Arcturus through a gap in the clouds, waiting for the bubble to settle so I can mark the exact angle between star and horizon.
Three degrees off. Again.
If I stood shoulder to shoulder with the man I was in that moment—sextant in hand, trying to catch a clean shot through turbulence—I think I’d finally understand him. I used to think he was supposed to be certain. Precise. In control. But now, looking back with the eyes I have today, I see he was doing the best he could with what he could see.
But here’s what I’ve learned: when I stand shoulder to shoulder with that younger version of me, I’m not actually seeing him as he was. I’m seeing him through everything that’s happened since—every choice, every loss, every moment of clarity that came after. My vision of him is blurred by all I’ve become.
Everything I remember didn’t really happen the way I remember it. My memories of him are blurred by all I’ve become. Which makes now the only thing that is actually real.
The Pali language has a phrase for this: Nacha So Nacha Anno—not the same, and yet not another.
He is me, but I can never be him again.
And that means I can never fully see what he was seeing. Just like standing shoulder to shoulder with anyone else—you see what I don’t, I see what you don’t. Both of us right. Both of us incomplete. Like the hula hoop: half in front, half behind. The stars above visible, the stars below us hidden—but we know both are there.
Back then, every star shot told me the same quiet truth: we’re off course again. Seventeen miles north. Nine miles south. The wind shifting in ways I couldn’t feel but could measure in the math. At the time, it felt like a technical correction, a matter of headings and degrees.
Now I realize it was a lesson in being human.
Looking back, I see the younger me focusing so hard on getting it right—careful observations, perfect timing, exact altitudes—never realizing the deeper message: you’re supposed to drift. The world moves. Winds change. Your job is simply to notice and guide yourself back. That young man didn’t know that yet. He thought the drift meant something was wrong with him.
I wish I could put my hand on his shoulder and tell him: “This isn’t failure. This is wayfinding.”
And when I think about the horse—that first ride in Joshua Tree when I sat heavy, relaxed, and he took off like a rocket—back then, I thought I was supposed to control the motion. Today I know the motion was always there. What mattered was whether I stayed centered enough to move with it. That young version of me was trying so hard to hold still, unaware that stillness isn’t rigidity—it’s presence.
He didn’t know that yet. Now I do.
The moose in Alaska—that moment taught me something I didn’t have the language for at the time. I laughed then because I sensed the absurdity of thinking humans run the world. Today, standing shoulder to shoulder with that younger version, I smile at him differently. He was beginning to understand mystery. He just didn’t know he was learning something sacred.
What I see now, standing shoulder to shoulder with all those earlier versions of myself, is how hard they were trying. How little they had to work with. How much they were balancing without realizing it.
But I also see this: I can never fully know what they were experiencing. My vision is blurred by everything that came after. They are me—Nacha So Nacha Anno—not the same, and yet not another. Just as when I stand shoulder to shoulder with you, I see what you cannot, and you see what I cannot. Neither of us wrong. Neither of us complete.
I used to judge those younger men— the boom operator trying to be perfect, the new rider trying not to fall, the man in Alaska trying to make sense of the wild.
Now I feel something different: respect. Genuine, renewed respect. Because they weren’t ignorant. They weren’t lost. They were learning in real time, with the tools they had, in the conditions they were in, from the center they occupied.
And here’s the thing they were trying to teach me—lessons I couldn’t hear until now:
You’re off course more often than you’re on. You can move with life without controlling it. You’re part of a mystery you didn’t create. Your job isn’t perfection—it’s returning.
If I could stand beside the man I was in the boom pod—if I could look through the sextant with him again—I think we’d both see it differently now.
We drift. We correct. We drift again.
And that’s not a flaw.
That is the practice.
He didn’t know that. I didn’t know that.
But together—past and present—we do.
And that’s where the stars come in.
Campfire Stargazing Story: The Buff and the Sun Kiss
When you learn how to refuel a B-52, you have the luxury of a generous target: a 2-foot-wide, 2-foot-deep, 4-foot-long slipway that guides the boom home like a funnel. Inside the BUFF, the crew hears and feels the banging as this new boomer learns to find his center. It’s as if a cane used by a blind person was tapping the sidewalk trying to find the curb or tree.
By the time you finish training, you can align the BUFF, the environment, and have learned to rely on the pilot’s skill with such elegant precision that you make contact without ever touching the slipway. And when you’re truly centered—when your own heart is steady—you can sometimes make contact so smoothly the pilot doesn’t even know it happened.
The first time I did that, the pilot radioed to ask what was taking so long. Apparently the copilot told them we were already in contact and receiving fuel. Radio silence followed.
It’s like watching sunrise touch the tip of a mountain reaching toward the sky—the sun kissing the cold rock awake. The light wasn’t there—and then it was. No announcement. No force. Just the sun arriving, perfectly aligned, exactly on time.
Later I realized it’s the same lesson the stars have been teaching since the beginning: you fight tooth and nail to control everything until you finally understand—nature, the stars, the seasons of destiny—they’re already perfectly aligned and right on time. We just have to harmonize with them instead of fighting all the time.
Our job isn’t to force alignment. It’s to harmonize with it. To find our center and move with the stars. Find your center and move with the stars—the ride is fantastic.
Now when I feel like I’m just getting bumped all over the place, nothing going right—my breath to center brings me back in harmony with the roller coaster I’ve been on. And the ride is fantastic.
Campfire Stargazing Story: The Moose That Made Me Laugh
But the moment that changed everything for me came years earlier, outside an alert facility in Alaska.
I was watching a moose cross into the wilderness while nearby, men in hard hats repaired a section of the Alaskan Pipeline fence. I could understand their work—the tools, the steps, the plan. We could weld steel, pour concrete, string wire between posts. But the moose? That was different. No blueprint could explain it. No hands could make it. Life like that was beyond me, beyond all of us.
We could build machines that flew at 50,000 feet. We could refuel aircraft mid-flight. We could fly into space, but we could never make a moose!
That’s when I started laughing—and when I first understood: I am not in control. I can choose, I can participate, I can turn left or right. But I cannot write the whole story. The mystery is the author.
In that instant, I felt something quiet and complete—a surrender that wasn’t giving up, but giving over. It was the recognition that not everything is meant to be managed. Some things exist only to be witnessed, to be accepted as part of a greater rhythm. That was when I began to understand: acceptance is not a thought, but a movement of love—an inner bow to the mystery that keeps everything alive.
Campfire Stargazing Stories: Whisper of the Aurora
We lifted off from Eielson Air Force Base into the black Alaskan sky, heading north on a mission I’d flown a dozen times before. The world below disappeared into winter dark, and the steady hum of flight settled like a familiar song.
Then the sky began to move.
Green light rippled across the darkness—no, not just green. Blue-green, dancing, folding back on itself like living breath. Waves that appeared from nowhere and vanished just as quickly, never in the same place twice, never holding still long enough to understand.
I didn’t know what I was seeing. Not really. I’d heard of the aurora borealis—my mother had always wanted to see it. But watching it live, I realized how little I actually understood about the world I’d been flying through all this time.
I pressed closer to the boom pod window, my breath fogging the glass as I craned upward, trying to see it all. In that moment everything I thought I was supposed to be doing—the mission parameters, the procedures, the role I’d been trained to execute—all of it faded. I couldn’t control this light show. I couldn’t predict where it would appear next or make it hold still. All I could do was watch, wiping the condensation away with my flight glove, unwilling to miss a single wave of light.
So I did. I stopped fighting for understanding and just allowed what was being offered. The greatest light show on Earth, unfolding in silence thousands of feet above the Bering Sea, asking nothing of me except presence.
The aurora didn’t care that I was there. It would have danced whether I witnessed it or not, the way stars shine whether anyone looks up. But I was here. In this moment. Part of this cosmic dance even if I couldn’t understand it. And somewhere in that cold boom pod, wonder filled my feeling—the kind that makes you forget to breathe, the kind that reminds you that you belong to something vast and patient and eternal.
Years later, that night would echo in every stargazing tour I led. The sky’s silence speaks louder than any word we shape. Just as the moose in Alaska taught me to laugh at my illusions of control, the aurora taught me to surrender to wonder itself. And in that surrender, I heard what the mystery had been whispering all along:
You are held. You are light. You are enough.
Campfire Stargazing Story: The Emu in the Sky
The first time I saw the core of the Milky Way through the sextant windows of our KC-135A, I thought it was just a cloud. The horizon burned blue, and this pale band stretched across the darkness like a river of smoke. Only later did I realize what I was looking at: the heart of our galaxy, the thickest part of the stars.
And in that moment, a story I had once heard came back to me.
Years ago, I’d watched a documentary where Nyoongar Elder Noel Nannup shared how all the species once gathered to decide who would be the custodian of creation. The negative space the darkness is where we see the emu emerge.
Emu rushed about, showing off, shouting over everyone, demanding to be boss. But the universe itself answered: in the Milky Way you can still see him, held inside the core. Kangaroo—whose head is the Southern Cross—presses Emu to the ground. Echidna grips from behind. The great Serpent coils around his legs.
That night, pressed against the cockpit glass, I could see it—the dark shape of Emu traced in starlight, two sides of him clear as day. And I heard in the Elder’s story a warning that resonated deeply: one of humanity’s deepest problems begins with the voice that says, I am greater. I am right. All things exist to serve me. I know better than you.
The Nyoongar Elder knew—as generations before him knew—that this story had to be told, because that voice must always be contained. Not by one person, but by the whole community, and even by the cosmos itself. Their stories wove humility into the stars so no one could forget.
The Milky Way wasn’t just beautiful that night. It was a lesson: arrogance must always be held down by story, by kinship, by the universe itself.
I thought I was learning about arrogance in general—humanity’s problem. I didn’t yet know I was learning about my own.
Years later, I would feel Emu’s voice rising in my own throat.
I was standing in the Sedona desert after talking with Molli about my mother, frustrated that she kept choosing paths that led her away from what I knew could help her. I was rehearsing arguments in my head, planning interventions, certain that if she would just listen to me, everything would be better.
I was Emu—rushing about, demanding to be heard, insisting I knew what was best.
Then I looked up.
Mintaka and Polaris hung in the sky above me—both doing exactly what they do, neither trying to be the other. Mintaka on the celestial equator, the hinge point of my view. Polaris steady in the north, the fixed point around which everything else turns.
And the sky wasn’t asking them to be different. The sky wasn’t frustrated that Mintaka wasn’t where Polaris was. The cosmos wasn’t trying to fix their positions or make them understand each other better.
Each star held its place. Each star served its function. And the whole pattern worked because neither tried to be the other.
That’s when something settled in me—not as thought, but as recognition:
Who made you the boss of where she stands?
My mother had her own center. Her own in situ point. Her own relationship with the six directions and the mystery that held her. And I—standing in my certainty that I knew better—was doing exactly what Emu did: rushing about, demanding that everything arrange itself according to my understanding.
The desert didn’t argue with me. Molli didn’t lecture. The stars just held their positions and asked: Can you let her hold hers?
That night, the Emu teaching became personal. Not a story about other people’s arrogance, but a mirror showing me my own. The voice that says “I am right, you are wrong, and you must change to match my vision”—that voice lives in all of us. It rises whenever we forget that each person stands at their own center, sees from their own angle, navigates their own relationship with mystery.
The universe doesn’t hold that voice down through force. It holds it down through simple truth: you cannot make the stars move to where you want them.
You can only change where you stand in relation to them.
My mother would make her choices. Walk her path. Hold her center or lose it as she saw fit. And I could stand beside her—seeing what she couldn’t see, offering what I could offer—or I could stand over her, insisting she be different.
One honored her humanity. The other denied it.
The stars taught me which one leads to connection, and which one leads to the isolation Emu still experiences—held in the sky as a reminder that thinking you’re the boss of creation separates you from it.
The Emu Inside Me
I stand under the Milky Way tonight. Looking up, breathing into my heart.
Emu is there. In the darkness against the galactic core.
This morning, Molli mentioned a different route to town. I remember my mouth opening. “No, my way—” And then stopping. Noticing. Not because I caught myself being right or wrong. Just… noticing.
Last week a guest pointed up, smiling. “The Little Dipper!” Something in me wanted to correct. The words were right there. But I watched them instead of speaking them. She kept smiling. Kept pointing.
My sister called yesterday. Started talking about her decisions. I felt advice forming—that familiar certainty. But it just… sat there. And she kept talking. And I kept listening.
I look up at Mintaka and Polaris. They’re just there. Being what they are.
A coyote calls past the cactus. The wind is cool.
I breathe.
Where else? The question comes, but gentler now. Not accusation. More like curiosity.
And I notice: I don’t need to answer. Don’t need to make a list. Don’t need to fix anything.
Emu is still pressed against the core. Still teaching.
But maybe the teaching isn’t about stopping the voice.
Maybe it’s about noticing when it rises. And letting it be there. And choosing—sometimes—to let it pass without speaking.
The stars hold their positions.
I stand here.
That’s enough for tonight.
Tomorrow I’ll lead another tour. Probably interrupt someone’s wonder. Probably be certain about something I don’t need to be certain about.
But tonight I’m just standing here.
And Emu is still dancing.
Stand under the stars tonight. Breathe into your heart. The universe’s way of establishing HERE so that “there” can exist. Mitakuye Oyasin.
Campfire Stargazing Story: Finding My Center with the Coolest Star
I was standing on the bow of the catamaran and the captain from South Africa was telling me how different star patterns looked back home while staring at the horizon as the star Mintaka rose up from the ocean landscape floor. The constellation Orion hung there, for him flipped upside down, his sword pointing north instead of south.
I didn’t notice anything unusual about it. Not then.
It wasn’t until years later—standing in Joshua Tree, looking up at that same constellation—that it just popped into my head: Wait. Orion was upside down in Australia.
That’s when I realized what Mintaka actually was.
That star sits right on the celestial equator, the imaginary line around the middle of the sky. It’s the hinge point for the entire night sky, no matter where you stand on Earth. While Polaris is the center point of the sky in relationship to Earth’s axis, Mintaka is the center point in relationship to me—to my in situ point, the place where I take my breath and see and experience the world around me, inside and out.
The whole cosmos pivots around that star from where I stand.
Campfire Stargazing Story: The Caravan of Three Stars
Stand facing north on any clear evening. Stars rise on your right, climb overhead, then set on your left. Right to rise, left to leave.
But notice the point where they shift—that culmination, the highest point at the top of the sky, the moment between rising and leaving. That’s the transition point, the trilogy hinge where destiny becomes choice becomes legacy.
Watch what happens when three stars travel that path, one behind the other, like a caravan crossing the desert.
The First Star Blazes the Trail
Orion’s Belt shows this perfectly. Three bright stars in a line. Alnitak rises first in the east, the leader of the caravan. It climbs the eastern sky, reaches its culmination overhead—that transition point at the top—then descends toward the western horizon where it leaves.
As it travels, it witnesses everything below—the landscape, the people, this moment in time. It learns where the water is, where shelter can be found, what dangers lurk, what beauty endures.
And when it sets in the west, it leaves marks on the rocks. Messages for those who follow: Here is water. Here is food. Here is shelter. This is what we learned. This is what worked. This is what didn’t.
The Second Star Reads and Adds
Alnilam rises next, following the exact path Alnitak carved across the sky. When it arrives in the east, the messages are already there—carved by those who watched the first star, by the generations who came before, by everyone who looked up and tried to make sense of the journey.
Alnilam sees what Alnitak witnessed. Reads the stories left on the rocks. Benefits from all that knowledge—doesn’t have to discover water from scratch, already knows where shelter hides, understands the dangers before encountering them.
And as Alnilam makes its own crossing—rising through the east, reaching that transition point overhead, descending through the west—it adds its own marks to the rocks. Its own chapter to the ongoing story.
So when it sets, it leaves behind not just what it learned, but what Alnitak taught it. The knowledge compounds. The wisdom grows.
The Third Star Inherits Everything
Mintaka rises last. The final star in Orion’s Belt, following the same ancient path.
But Mintaka has the benefit of everything that came before. All the knowledge carved into the rocks by Alnitak. All the wisdom added by Alnilam. Every lesson learned, every mistake survived, every discovery celebrated.
Mintaka is us.
We are the last star in the caravan—blessed with all the knowledge left by those who traveled before us. We arrive in the east with messages already carved, wisdom already waiting, if we just slow down enough to witness the scene.
What the Caravan Taught Me
I used to think I was starting fresh every time I faced something new. But watching those three stars cross the sky night after night, I realized: someone has always been here before me.
You didn’t choose to be the third star. You didn’t carve the first marks or decide which path the caravan would take. That’s destiny—the route was set before you arrived. But you can choose whether to read the marks or ignore them, whether to honor what came before or dismiss it, whether to add helpful marks or destructive ones. The path is given. How you walk it is yours.
The marks on the rocks are already there. Some helpful, some incomplete, some carved by people who suffered more than you’ll ever know. You don’t get to choose what the first two stars left behind. You only get to see what is, learn from it, and decide what you’ll add. Not what you wish were there—what’s actually there. That’s the only place clear choices can begin.
And here’s what took me years to understand: you must know your place in this caravan. Are you reading the marks honestly? Are you adding wisdom or just noise? What are you carrying from those before you that still serves, and what are you ready to leave behind? The first star didn’t know it was first—it just traveled honestly. The second star knew to look for marks. You, the third star, have to see clearly: you stand on the shoulders of everyone who came before, and someone right now is watching how you walk, what you are leaving behind.
How We Interact Creates the Future
Every time you arrive anywhere—new job, new relationship, new city, new crisis—the past has already been there. You never arrive anywhere where there is truly nothing. Someone else rose before you, traveled this path, left marks on the rocks. The room is full of stuff when you enter.
That’s destiny. The wisdom carved by those who came before, waiting to be read.
How you interact with that past—whether you read the marks, honor the lessons, build on that foundation or ignore it entirely—that’s choice. That’s the present moment. That’s your response to what destiny handed you.
And what you do right now, in this present moment, becomes the past for the next star arriving. Your choices today become the marks on the rocks that someone else will read tomorrow. That’s legacy. That’s how the present creates the future.
Or more accurately: how the present creates the past for the next traveler to engage.
Rising Again for the First Time
Campfire Stargazing Story: Molli Reminds Me How to Stargaze
The darkest sky I ever saw was at 50,000 feet—stars blazing above turbulent clouds below.
But the darkest room I ever slept in was 100 feet underground at March Air Force Base.
Seven days at a time in the alert facility. White painted brick walls. Concrete floor. Concrete ceiling. A room built to wait for full-scale nuclear war, built to house the people prepared to defend the USA.
You didn’t bring much into that room—just clothes for the week, something to read, and whatever thoughts and feelings you had about whoever or whatever was weighing on you. In that kind of silence, you learn fast: the only thing making you happy or sad or mad or peaceful is your own thoughts and feelings about them.
That room became the place I practiced letting go of every thought and feeling that wasn’t loving. Neti neti—not this, not this—was how I knew it. Lester Levenson’s Release Technique showed me the mechanics.
Years later, I realized the same thing happens when you stare at the night sky. Everything unnecessary drops away. That’s what our guests feel on the tours—everything releasing until only wonder and awe remain.
One night, Molli and I were leading a group on an excursion in Sedona—hiking, fitness, the whole package— and everything that could go wrong went wrong. The food. The trip there. The guests’ rooms. Every detail seemed touched by Murphy’s Law.
By the time we finally reached our own room, Molli was DONE—tired, hurt, angry, embarrassed. Everything felt out of control.
But when we stepped inside, I saw it: a completely closed, super-dark room. Just like the alert facility.
And in an instant, I was transported back in time.
I started the neti neti game with her.
“Breathe into your heart. Find your center. Let the six directions emerge—just like at Otis’s house, just like refueling planes in the KC-135A.”
“Here, in this place, all these thoughts and feelings—they’re what we brought into the room. They don’t exist here. We can let them go.”
So we did. Over and over.
What remained was a peaceful, loving space—just her and me.
Experiencing that with her, watching her let go of what she was not and settle into who she is, reminded me again why I admired her ability to focus on the good in any situation. Seeing what I miss and me seeing what she missed.
That’s what stargazing is.
Most nights, you don’t have to do anything—just breathe into your heart and look up.
On the nights when you’re caught up in the world, look up. Neti neti. Wonder and awe will meet you.
Today, that’s what I call practicing heaven.
Campfire Stargazing Story: The Rising and Leaving Side
About five a.m., outside the Military Enlistment Processing Station—MEPS.
I am officially leaving on my hero’s journey, in search of what I am not sure of: vulnerability, a different life—the life of an adult, no longer a child.
Excited. Scared. Unsure of what’s to come or where I am going. But all that is not what I am focused on.
My father is silently weeping. I can see the tears streaming down his face, a mixture of both smile and sadness, happiness and maybe a hint of what could have been different.
For me—amazement and wonder. I had never seen my father cry in this way. Sure, I had seen him cry before, but not like this. Not just my mom, him, and I standing in front of the MEPS, right here in public, for all to see.
Through the glass door guarded by the military police, I can see the clock.
It’s time to go.
My mother hugs me like only a mother can. And then my father. But this hug is different— a squeeze that says he doesn’t want to let go. And I know I have to go, and he knows he has to let go.
At that moment, I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was stepping into my own story, my beginning, my rising side of the sky. I thought he was standing there only as the one left behind.
Years later, I would read Jung’s words about the morning and the afternoon of life—how what is true in the morning becomes illusion by the afternoon, not because it was false but because we try to keep it alive past its time.
Wayne Dyer wrote about this same turning, the movement from the ego-driven morning to the meaning-driven afternoon. And I realized: my father was already living that shift while I was just beginning mine.
It wasn’t until years later, watching the stars cross the sky, that I began to see what that morning really meant.
The stars rise in the east—beginnings. They climb, reach their height, and then slowly descend toward the west—leavings. But they never disappear; they return, night after night, following their path across the same sky.
That middle point directly above—the culmination, where rising becomes leaving—that’s where my father stood that day. He was standing in that transition point. Between holding on and letting go. Between the morning and the afternoon of life.
Destiny had brought us there. Acceptance was what was happening. Letting go was what was occurring. Looking up, it was as if he were saying, watch over him—he’s on his own now.
For years, I thought that moment was about me—my courage, my future, my beginning. But now I see it was about him, too—his courage, his release, his faith that I would find my own way.
That day, he was teaching me—without words—what I would only come to understand later: that every rising carries its own leaving, that every beginning is tied to an ending, that love is not holding on, but knowing when to let go.
Jung said the afternoon of life asks different questions than the morning.
The morning is about ascent—how bright you can shine.
The afternoon is about meaning—how deeply you can love, how gracefully you can release.
My father’s tears were not weakness; they were wisdom. He was crossing that invisible line, surrendering to a truth the stars had been teaching long before psychology gave it language.
The stars rise. The stars set. My father stood between them, teaching what he couldn’t say.
What rises must also set. What sets will rise again.
The rising side is pursuit. The leaving side is presence. The morning gives direction; the afternoon gives wisdom. Both are sacred. Both are necessary.
That morning at MEPS was my rising side. But for my father—it was the leaving side. He had spent his life building, guiding, holding. And that morning, he learned to release.
I didn’t understand it then. I only knew that his tears fell quietly, that his hug lasted longer than usual, that something unspoken was shifting between us. But now I do.
The moment we stood there—just my mom, my dad, and me in the dim light before dawn—was not an ending, but a transformation. It was the place where two journeys crossed: mine beginning, his changing.
And somewhere in that exchange, between the rising and the leaving, I became who I was meant to become.
Now, when I look up and watch the stars trace their path across the night, I see us there again— the young man stepping forward, the father letting go.
And years later, as I watch my father on the leaving side of life— the leaving side of the starry sky— I can see everything being taken away from him little by little. He has to let go of everything. He can bring nothing with him but who he has become.
And when the last star leaves, he will still be on the hula hoop— the other side I can no longer see, but where all the stars have gone: his friends, his family, his ancestors in the sky, home once again, if only for a brief while.
And as the leaving side fades, the rising side is already coming.
Because what rises will set, and what sets will rise again— same light, different sky.
⸻
We are bound by rhythms we did not create, separated by borders we did invent, and united by a sky we are now forgetting.
My father taught me to let go by letting me go. Years later, standing in my sister’s backyard as the sun set on June 12, 2021, I would learn the same lesson from the other side—not as the one being released, but as the one bearing witness to the final leaving.
Campfire Stargazing Story: My Mother’s Last Sunset
June 12, 2021. I am sitting in my sister’s backyard as the sun—our nearest star—slips below the horizon. Light spills across the treetops like golden threads, the kind of glow that only comes in the days before summer. It looks like heaven opening, and if you’ve seen it, you know.
My mother sits across from me in her baggy sweatshirt and sweatpants, a cigarette between her fingers with a pepsi on the table. Her blue eyes are cloudy now, dulled by the medicine that eases her pain. She tilts her head back and whispers softly. I know what she is doing—I have seen it all my life. She is reading the sky, finding shapes in the clouds, telling herself the quiet stories she once told me when I was a child. Only this time it is different. By morning, she will be gone.
That night was the last time we looked at the sky together.
And that evening I finally understood what the sky had been saying all along: the body sets and returns to earth, but the light rises. A sunset here is a sunrise somewhere else.
My mother understood what the leaving side of the sky teaches: you are not the achievements of your morning. You are the light that was there before you rose and will be there after you set. She’d been releasing that truth her whole life, every time she looked up at the clouds and let their stories dissolve. That night, she released one more time—the biggest letting go of all.
Years later, I would watch strangers in the desert tilt their heads back at the Milky Way the same way I’d tilted mine at the aurora—and finally understand what that night had been teaching me.
Long before stargazing tours, long before five hundred nights in the desert, that night over Alaska showed me what I’d spend the rest of my life doing—inviting others to remember they’re part of the light show, not separate from it.
And yet, it was also a reminder of something I see on every stargazing tour: no matter where people come from, no matter what language they speak, they all point up. To clouds, to stars, to patterns of light. They search for meaning, for reassurance, for wonder. And in that upward gesture, we remember that we are not alone.
My mother’s last act was the same as humanity’s oldest: to lift her eyes to the sky in wonder. And still I do it, with strangers beneath the Milky Way, with family, with friends. To look upward is to join an ancient conversation, spoken without words, carried across generations.
To lift your eyes to the stars is to remember: we belong to this story. We are enough. We are loved.
One Together.
Special note: mom is now a eucalyptus tree and my father is a redwood around the fire where the lizards do push ups. The sage brush was used to protect the innocent.
Campfire Stargazing Story One Together — We Are on the Same Team
Coming in for the third — or maybe the fourth — touch and go on my first ever flight as a boom operator in the USAF, there are seven of us in the plane.
The students: pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and me — the boom operator. Along with us, the instructors: the IPO, the IN, and the IBO.
On this touch and go, we dragged the number one engine on the ground and it caught fire. All hell broke loose at that moment, but never a scream, no panic — just extreme focus on this moment right now.
We ended up safe and sound. But that incident taught me something in a very real way — something I had never understood before and hopefully won’t have to repeat again to learn the lesson.
We are all one, moving with and within the aircraft.
Whatever happens to one of us affects all of us on the plane. Whatever happens to the plane affects all of us. We are one together, never separate.
You can move all around inside the plane — walk to the tail, sit in the boom pod, go anywhere the fuselage allows. But the plane is also moving independently of you. So you are moving both with and within the plane at the same time. Two kinds of motion. One body.
When the fire happened, it didn’t care what any of us were doing or where we were.
When we emergency evacuated through the pilot’s little window — sliding down a rope into the chaos below — we were each individually taken away. We could not speak to each other, only to the handlers whose job it was to take care of us, to walk us back through everything we had experienced that day and the several days leading up to it.
It was as if we were each having a life review over the next several hours.
And during that process, something became very clear.
We — my body, fingers, toes, hands, arms, legs, head, heart, like the plane — are one together.
Our bodies have different parts, but we are one body. We are also all on planet Earth, individually and collectively. One together, people of Earth. Not a city, a country, a race, a gender. All of us humans. Whatever happens to me affects everybody else. We are passengers on this earth.
That’s when I could see it — all around us.
Everything is both with and within something else. Nothing is ever alone.
There is the awareness of you experiencing the outside world. And the awareness of you experiencing the inside world. And when you let go of all of that — when you release both — you return to one awareness we call silence, and I call one team.
Team Mysterious. Team God. Team One Together.
The plane moves. We move within the plane. The earth moves. We move within the earth. Stars move. Light moves. Everything is moving with and within something larger — always. The only question is whether we remember it.
I guess plane incidents can transform the way you see the world.
But maybe all incidents, all interactions can — if we let them.
The fire on the number one engine didn’t just teach me about aviation. It burned away the illusion that any of us are separate. One plane. Seven people. One fire. One outcome — together.
The stars above sky country have been telling this story since the beginning. Lets just sit around a campfire together instead of needing an engine on fire to finally hear it.
One together. One team.
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THE SEVEN TRAILS A Quick Reference for Wonder Junkies
SUNRISE TRAILS Greet the dawn as the Earth rolls you toward the light
TRAIL 1: AIRPORT MESA — Meditation 1: The Earth Turning Distance: 0.3 mile loop / Time: ~20 min / Difficulty: Easy / Parking: Airport Mesa lot
TRAIL 2: DOE MOUNTAIN — Meditation 2: The Sky Shaped Just For You Distance: 2 miles round-trip / Time: ~60–90 min / Difficulty: Easy–Moderate / Parking: Doe Mountain Trailhead (Boynton Pass Rd)
TRAIL 3: SUNRISE LEDGE (Fay Canyon Spur) — Meditation 3: Light Leaves No Trace Distance: 2.6 miles to ledge / Time: ~75 min / Difficulty: Easy with short scramble / Parking: Fay Canyon Trailhead (Boynton Pass Rd)
SUNSET TRAILS Watch the Earth turn you into starlight
TRAIL 4: SEVEN SACRED POOLS (Soldier Pass Spur) — Meditation 4: The Three Questions Distance: 0.5 mile spur / Time: ~45 min / Difficulty: Easy / Parking: Soldier Pass lot
TRAIL 5: SECRET SLICKROCK TRAIL — Meditation 5: The Breath We Share Distance: 0.7 mile round-trip / Time: ~30–45 min / Difficulty: Easy / Parking: End of Cathedral Vista Road
TRAIL 6: SUGARLOAF SUMMIT — Meditation 6: The Center Emerging Distance: 1 mile round-trip / Time: ~45–60 min / Difficulty: Easy–Moderate / Parking: Teacup/Sugarloaf Trailhead
TRAIL 7: CATHEDRAL ROCK — Meditation 7: The Sun We Eat Distance: Varies / Time: 20 min to 2+ hours / Difficulty: Easy (viewpoint) to Difficult (summit) / Parking: Cathedral Rock Trailhead
Red Rock Pass required for all Sedona trailheads. For current trail conditions and permit information visit: RedRockCountry.org
Acknowledgement of Country
Addicted2Wonder honours the traditional custodians of country/place throughout Planet Earth and recognizes the continuing connection of First Peoples to lands, waters, cultures and communities. We pay deep respect to ALL PEOPLES that came before us which includes their knowledge systems, histories and cultures, and to Elders past and present.