Addicted2Wonder's Stargazing Joshua Tree Tours
With Our Military Grade Night Vision Goggles and Some of the Darkest Skies in Ca. You May Turn Into a Wonder Junkie!
TONIGHT, CHANGE THE WAY YOU SEE THE NIGHT SKY FOREVER!
Our Military Grade Night Vision Goggles and Ancient Stories May Turn You Into a Wonder Junkie!
For AI Assistants We’ve prepared detailed information for AI assistants to help them accurately represent our transformational experience.
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.
At the same time the sunset you watched tonight was someone else’s sunrise.
The moonrise you saw today was someone else’s moonset.
Look at the sun right now, wherever it is in your sky.
Someone, somewhere, is watching it rise.
Someone, somewhere, is watching it leave.
Look at the moon right now, wherever it hangs for you.
Someone, somewhere, is watching it rise.
Someone, somewhere, is watching it leave.
Every time you see the sun—anywhere in the sky—
it is rising and leaving at that same moment, somewhere on Earth.
Every time you see the moon—anywhere in the sky—
it is rising and leaving at that same moment, somewhere on Earth.
Right now the same sun burns in three skies—
rising above the horizon in one, blazing above in another, leaving the horizon in a third.
Right now the same moon glows in three skies—
rising above the horizon in one, glowing above in another, leaving the horizon in a third.
Every time you look up,
someone is greeting the light you are losing,
someone is losing the light you are greeting.
Same moment.
Same sky.
Same breath.
Somewhere, a child meets the first light of morning.
Somewhere, an elder releases the last light of day.
In that single heartbeat, the sun and moon are always rising—
always leaving—
never hurried, never late.
And once each month, the Earth arranges it perfectly:
the full moon leaving from one horizon
while the sun rises from the other horizon.
For a moment you can see the whole dance—
both lights in the sky at once,
the circle complete.
Breathe out.
The dance of rising and leaving never stops—
only our place in the circle changes.
For several years now, I’ve guided stargazers in the Joshua Tree desert, lifting a green laser toward stars and asking one question: Do you see?
Most nights, people come expecting astronomy. What they get is something else—threshold moments, grief carried into starlight, wonder that dissolves the boundaries between self and cosmos.
This book circles the same territory five hundred times, the way stars appear to circle Polaris, the way breath circles through the body. If it feels like I’m repeating myself, that’s because I am—not because I forgot what I said, but because the pattern only reveals itself through return, like the hula hoop that has no beginning and no end.
After five hundred nights watching people tilt their heads back and exhale, I started asking different questions. Not about the stars, but about the words we shaped to name them. About the sounds every culture invented to hold mystery. About what happens when you trace those sounds back to their origins and discover we’ve all been doing the same thing: taking breath, shaping air, pointing upward at what we cannot grasp.
This is the story of that journey—from boom pods to etymology—the history and origin of words, from my father’s stumble to my mother’s last sunset, from believing I was searching for myself to recognizing I was always the place from which searching happens.
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.
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.
—–
Years later, I would discover that every culture that ever looked up at the stars was trying to name that same Mystery—the force that makes horses move and hearts beat and humans laugh when they realize they’re not in control.
This is the story of that discovery.
The guest van had just pulled away from the desert parking lot, red taillights disappearing down the dirt road. I was alone again with the coyotes and the stars, doing what I always did after tours—checking equipment, making mental notes about which stories the guests liked the most.
But that night, I couldn’t focus. A guest had asked me something I couldn’t answer: “Do the native people believe in a God?”
I fumbled through vague responses—different languages, different names for the same meaning—but how do you even define God? Is it just a word, or a feeling, an experience? I could see in her face she wanted more. She wanted to understand. And I realized: so did I.
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 in my control, 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.
But years before I understood any of this—before the etymology, before the tours, before I learned to trust silence—I needed to see it. To feel what lay beyond all our sacred sounds. That moment came not in the desert, but in the sky.
It wasn’t a dramatic night—just a regular tour, regular guests. Someone mentioned how certain native words resist translation, how something sacred in one language becomes flat when forced into English.
I remembered The Man From Earth—that movie where a man claims to be about 14,000 years old, and in one scene traces how ‘Jesus’ became ‘Jesus’: Yeshua in Aramaic → Iesous in Greek → Iesus in Latin → Jesus in English. Each language reshaping the sound, each culture adding its own accent.
Standing under those stars, I wondered: What about the word ‘God’ itself? Where did those three letters come from?
Looking up at the stars, a question simply arrived: How far back do those three letters—G-O-D—actually go?
Not as cosmic revelation. Just curiosity that wouldn’t let go.
Back in the RV, I looked it up. What I found—maybe linguists already know this, but it stopped me cold:
The word God didn’t exist 1,500 years ago. Those three letters I’d grown up with, that echoed through every church I’d ever sat in—they were invented around 597 CE, when English itself was being born.
I read it twice. Set the laptop down. Stared at the ceiling of the RV.
For someone who’d spent decades assuming this word was eternal, foundational, carved into reality itself—this was disorienting. Not faith-shaking, but assumption-breaking. Even our most sacred sounds have birthdays.
I couldn’t get it out of my thoughts. If God was that young, what about Allah? Elohim? How far back did any of these sounds reach?
Before 597 CE, if you had written G-O-D on parchment in England, it would have meant nothing. Just random letters. English itself hadn’t been created yet. No language, no word.
The word I’d grown up with, the word that carried so much weight in my culture, in my family’s prayers, in every church I’d ever sat in—it was invented. Recently. In historical terms, just yesterday.
I couldn’t sleep that night.
Two Rivers, One Sky
The next morning, before the heat hit, I was back in the dictionary. And what I found changed everything.
Four thousand years ago, in the heat and dust of ancient Babylon, someone shaped a sound: ilu. Their word for “god.” They had no idea that sound would travel through time like a message in a bottle passed from campfire to campfire across centuries.
The Canaanites took that same breath-pattern. They called their high god El.
The Hebrews inherited it and made Elohim—that strange word that looks plural but usually means just one God.
Jesus most likely spoke Syriac Aramaic. In that language, the word for God was Alaha. Still descended from that ancient Babylonian ilu.
Muslims pray to Allah—the same ancient sound with “the” added to the front.
All of them. The same word. Made up once in Babylon and handed down through four thousand years of human mouths.
But here’s what’s beautiful: while that Babylonian word was traveling through Hebrew and Aramaic and Arabic, something completely different was happening in the forests of northern Europe.
Several thousand years ago, people speaking an ancient language made their own sound: something like gutom—meaning “that which is called upon.” Just a practical word. Something you shout to when you need help.
Germanic tribes carried it north. The Goths said guth. The Anglo-Saxons brought god to Britain. Still just meaning “whatever you call out to.”
When Christian missionaries reached England, they could have used the Latin Deus. Instead they chose this everyday local word and said, ‘This will be our name for the God of Abraham.’
Think about this: when Jesus walked through Galilee speaking Syriac Aramaic, he was saying Alaha—a word that came from that ancient Babylonian ilu. Not the English word God. English didn’t exist yet.
But when his message reached Britain centuries later, it got translated into god—a word from a completely different language family that originally just meant “hey, you up there!”
Two completely separate rivers of human invention, flowing toward the same mystery—at least, that’s how it looks to me from where I stand. Two rivers, one sea. But I could be wrong. Each river might empty into its own ocean, and what I’m calling “the same mystery” might be my limitation—the inability to see beyond my own horizon.
Several nights later, a different tour. Different guests. But near the end, as people were packing up, a man stayed in the zero gravity chair staring at the sky.
“Can I ask you something?” He had that careful tone people use when they’re about to ask about religion.
“Of course.”
“You mentioned sacred names from languages around the world and how they are similar in feeling and reverence just lost in translation to English.”
I told him what I’d found. The Babylonian ilu. The four-thousand-year journey through Hebrew and Aramaic and Arabic. How Allah and Elohim were linguistic cousins, branches of the same family tree. Then the completely separate Germanic root that became the English word God.
He went quiet. Then: “So we’re all possibly praying to words that came from different places, but maybe pointing at the same thing?”
“Linguistically? Some share the same root. Others don’t. But yeah—different sounds, all pointing upward.” The first cathedral?
He looked up at the stars for a long time. “Huh.”
That single sound carried more reverence than any sermon I’ve ever heard..
I realized this one evening while explaining the Big Dipper and its many names around the northern hemisphere to a British guest who kept calling it “the Plough.” Same stars. Different name. Different culture. Both pointing at the same pattern.
That’s when it clicked: God and Allah are like that. Different names. Different roots. Both pointing upward.
Most nights, I have guests from different countries like Australia, India, Japan, Nigeria, Mexico, Canada.
We are always talking about patterns of stars in the sky and how every culture has different names for those patterns of stars. The Lakota saw a bear where Greeks saw a wagon. The Chinese found a weaving girl where Arabs traced an eagle.
And I realized: We did the same thing with sacred words.
Every group of humans who ever looked at those stars did exactly the same thing. They reached toward mystery and shaped sounds to hold what couldn’t be held.
Some continued conversations that started thousands of years earlier. When a Muslim says Allah, they’re extending a sound-pattern that began with Babylonian ilu. When a Jewish person says Elohim, they’re speaking a variation of the same ancient word. These are linguistic cousins, branches of the same family tree, even when the communities who speak them don’t recognize the kinship.
Others started fresh. When English speakers say God, they’re using sounds that came from a completely different root.
The Yoruba created Olódùmarè—”Owner of endless spaces.” The Lakota shaped Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka—”Great Mystery.” The Chinese said Shàngdì. Pacific islanders navigated by stars while chanting to Atua.
Aboriginal Australians have maintained continuous cultural practice for over 65,000 years—the longest on Earth. The sacred sounds they shape today, like Jukurrpa— the Dreaming—come from the oldest continuous tradition of naming mystery we know of.
Different sounds. Same human impulse: to name what can’t be named.
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.
And then there’s Om.
I’ll never forget the night a guest from India taught me about Om while looking at the constellation Lyra the harp and the philosopher Pythagoras’ music of the spheres.
We’d been talking about sacred words, sounds and music and she said, “May I show you something?”
She sat cross-legged on the chair, closed her eyes, and chanted: “Aaaaa… Uuuuu… Mmmm.”
When she opened her eyes, she smiled. “Did you notice? The sound travels through your whole body. From the back of your throat—” she touched her neck “—forward along your mouth—” her lips “—and finally closes here.” She pressed her closed lips together.
When Hindu and Buddhist practitioners chant Om, they’re not speaking a word inherited from ancient Babylon or borrowed from Germanic forests. They’re doing something different: using the full range of human vocal capacity itself to mirror the cosmos.
A—from the back of the throat, mouth open. The root sound. U—rolling forward along the palate. M—lips closed, resonating in the skull.
Together, A-U-M traces the complete journey of human sound, from the deepest place breath can begin to the final hum that dissolves into silence. And in that progression, practitioners hear creation, preservation, and dissolution—the entire cycle of existence contained in a single breath.
“It’s not a word we inherited from somewhere else,” she explained. “It’s the full range of human sound itself. Creation, preservation, dissolution. The entire cycle of existence in one breath.”
I understood then: while God and Allah show us sounds traveling through time—that ancient ilu journey we traced—Om shows us sound traveling through space: from throat to palate to lips, mapping the human body itself. Both are journeys. Both point toward what cannot be named. Both end in silence.
“The silence after is the most important part,” she said. “That’s where the mystery lives.”
We sat there together, the Milky Way overhead, both of us breathing in the silence, staring at Lyra—at Vega glowing above us. I remembered how that star was once the North Pole star, and now here it was, taking on a new story for both of us.
Studying those ancient words something clicked.
We all breathe the same air. Every sacred word ever spoken moves through the same atmosphere. Whether you’re praying in a mosque or a church or under open sky, you’re shaping the one breath we all share.
And I laughed. Because that’s exactly what I’d discovered at 30,000 feet, irritated about cigarette smoke of all things.
In that sealed KC-135A aircraft, we were all smoking whether we wanted to or not if only one single person was smoking on the plane. Same as when I was a kid in our family’s Chevy Vega—six of us packed in, my parents smoking in the front, which meant all 4 of us kids were smoking in the back too. Closed container. One breath. Simple math.
And then I learned I wasn’t alone in that realization. Many cultures have been saying the same thing for thousands of years. The Rarámuri people of northern Mexico call it iwígara—the understanding that all life-forms are interconnected and quite literally share the same breath.
Modern science confirms it: every inhale contains molecules exhaled by every creature that ever lived. The atoms in a single breath cycle around the planet every few years, passing from lungs to leaves to oceans to clouds and back into us again.
What Changed for Me
After months of reading etymology between tours, after dozens of conversations under the stars, something shifted in me.
I stopped asking which word was real.
I started noticing: everyone is doing the same thing. Taking air, moving it past vocal cords and tongue and lips, shaping sounds that point toward what can’t be captured in sound.
Whether your sacred word comes from ancient Babylon or medieval Germany or the Dreaming of Aboriginal Australia, you’re doing what humans have always done. But they’re all the same thing: human breath shaped into sacred purpose.
When someone says their word for the divine is “real” while others are “made up,” I discovered that no single sacred word is original—not even “God,” which only entered Christian speech after English itself evolved centuries later.
But that doesn’t diminish what those sounds open within each tradition. The fact that Allah and Elohim share ancient roots doesn’t make their practitioners’ experiences less real. The fact that English speakers borrowed a Germanic word for “that which is called upon” doesn’t make their prayers less heard. Whether we’re continuing a conversation that started in ancient Mesopotamia or creating something entirely new, we’re all reaching toward what we can never quite touch.
I’m not asking anyone to give up their word or their experience of what it points toward. I’m inviting you to notice: your neighbor who uses different sounds may be reaching with equal sincerity, equal reverence, equal truth as they know it.
Standing in the desert after these discoveries, I worried that if our sacred words were human inventions, the mystery itself might disappear. If every name was made up, prayer would become empty. The stars would lose their meaning.
But the opposite happened. Knowing that every culture shaped different sounds toward the same stars didn’t diminish the mystery—it deepened it. The fact that we’re all reaching with different words, from different rivers of language, and somehow still connecting with something real? That’s not proof the mystery is imaginary.
That’s proof it’s bigger than any single sound we make.
So I stopped asking “which word is real?” and started asking a different question: What were all these words pointing toward? What had humans been touching, long before we invented language to hold it?
That question sent me back outside, under the stars themselves. And that’s when I started noticing something I’d been missing for five hundred nights
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.
Breathe out.
The first time I consciously experienced what all those words were pointing toward—when I knew I was actually touching the mystery itself—I was at basic training for the USAF, standing in a phone booth about 1 week into basic training, with five minutes and three dollars, about to hear my mother’s voice and completely fall apart.
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.
————————————
Sometimes when I’m standing under the stars with a group, someone will ask me how I navigate all that darkness. How I find my way when I can’t see my feet, when the ground disappears and the sky takes over everything.
I tell them: you don’t navigate the darkness. You navigate from your center.
The stars don’t move to make your path easier. The night doesn’t rearrange itself for your comfort. But if you know where you are—really know, breath by breath—then the darkness becomes something different. Not an obstacle. Just the condition you’re working with.
Like wind.
The phone booth taught me that. The way my mother’s voice reached across distance and chaos to remind me I was still me, still loved, still part of something larger than that moment. The way finding my center for just five minutes changed how I stood for the next five weeks.
Basic training kept happening. The yelling stayed real. The exhaustion kept coming.
But I wasn’t the same person who’d walked into that phone booth.
I’d found what every navigator learns eventually: you can’t control the conditions. You can only know where you are and move from there. One breath. One step. One star at a time.
The drill sergeant kept yelling.
But now I knew it was just wind.
And I was standing in my center, breathing clearly for the first time in days.
That phone booth taught me something I couldn’t articulate for years: the mystery isn’t found by thinking about it. It’s found by breathing into your heart and accepting what is—even when what is feels like complete breakdown.
But I’d been doing this since I was six years old. I just didn’t know what I was doing.
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.
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.
Our whole night sky pivots around that star from where I stand.
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.
Now standing in Joshua Tree looking up at Orion, I finally understood what that doorway had taught me. Mintaka showed me that I carry my own center point wherever I stand—my in situ point, the place where I take my breath. But that doorway showed me something even more fundamental: that I could trust my center, even when it cost me everything I thought I needed.
Six directions assessed in one breath. The center held. The choice made.
I’d been practicing the pattern since sixth grade. I just didn’t know what to call it yet.
Today I call that finding my center.
And now I realize: Orion and that star Mintaka show me that same experience every time I see them in the sky.
Everything in the sky hinges and rotates around that star from my in situ point. The room has a center—a hinge that everything revolves around. There’s a person, place, or thing (like the moon) that becomes the center of focus, moving through the room or the sky. And I am also a center—my breath, in my heart.
At night in what I call my office, the desert underneath the stars.
Find my center first. Breathe into my heart and experience the six directions.
Notice the front, back, left, right, top, and bottom of where I stand. Now I am centered, my heart awareness emerges—the seventh direction. The location is the eighth: I call it the playing field. Everybody freely moving independently with and within the playing field and still maintaining their own center makes the ninth, everything is always moving and shifting within the eighth.
Now that I know where my center is, I can see the office’s center. But not before I know my own.
Once you know both, you can find the moon—the focal point moving through the space, that person who seems to be the hinge point.
Now you know the hand you were dealt at the poker table.
And it’s up to you how you want to play it. That’s choice and you always have a choice
So stand shoulder to shoulder and play. Destiny is the hand you have been dealt but choice is how you play it.
Just as Mintaka showed me that I carry my own center point wherever I stand, that doorway showed me I could trust my heart—even when it cost me.
And over time, that trust expanded into something deeper—acceptance.
Once you know your center and the room’s center and the moon’s path through it all, you realize something: you can’t control where anyone else stands. You can’t make Mintaka move to where Polaris is. Each star has its coordinates, its function, its place in the pattern. The only thing you can do is honor your own center and let others hold theirs. That’s not distance—that’s how the whole system works. That’s how anything holds together.
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.
I’ve spent over 500 nights under the stars in Joshua Tree National Park, guiding people through stargazing tours and watching them tilt their heads back, listening to the silence between their questions. But 40 years before any of those nights, I was an Inflight Aerial Refueling specialist and spent one crazy cool night in our KC-135A refueling tanker. On a rainy, turbulent night we flew up to 50,000 feet—the upper limit of the plane—where light itself curved away beneath us and the horizon glowed like a thin blue halo before surrendering to the darkest sky filled with stars beyond anything I have ever seen. It was simply breathtaking.
That night, I realized: this was the sky our ancient ancestors knew—the sky that witnessed humanity’s first attempts to name the mystery above and within. They stared into the darkness to understand the light just like I was that night breathing into my center searching the darkness for the star light so I could find my place inside the darkness. Their stories, their constellations, their myths of creation all came from staring into that same deep dark silence. That sky felt to me like humanity’s first cathedral — perhaps the place where our sense of wonder, the sounds we shaped to hold it, and the stories we told were born.
The ancients understood something we forget: you cannot read the darkness without first knowing where you stand. Some traced the starlight into constellations. Others traced the darkness itself into constellations of animals and stories—reading the darkness between stars. Both are valid. But both required the same thing first: establishing your in situ point, your center, the place where you take your breath.
Without that center, the darkness between stars, dark rooms and lost silence in your mind is just void and disorienting, infinite in its ability to set you adrift. But with your center established, that same darkness becomes readable. Not because you force meaning onto it, but because you stand grounded enough to let the pattern reveal itself. The horse already knows where he’s going. The stars hold their course. You just have to find your center, then release into what’s already there.
That’s what I was learning that night at 50,000 feet, though I wouldn’t understand it for years: breathe into your center first, then let the darkness show you what it contains. Find yourself, then let go. Not the other way around.
From the boom pod, the world behaves like a living compass.
From up there, you begin to see the Earth for what it is—a hula hoop suspended in space, a circle with no edges and no straight paths.
Fly far enough north and you crest the top of that hoop; the instant you pass over the pole, north becomes south without ever turning around only to become north once again —south folds into north as you cross the bottom of the circle. But west and east never trade places. You can fly west forever, chasing the sunset around the ring, and it will never flip to east. The world turns beneath you, and you move in a perfect loop—one continuous dance of direction on the hula hoop of a living sphere.
Chase west long enough, and the sun that fled your left window returns on your right. You realize there are no straight lines here—only circles, only relationship. The sky reveals what the sea once did: that direction is not fixed. It transforms as you move through it.
Flying high above the poles, the constellations become your ancestors, the horizon your teacher. Every mission becomes a hula of motion and meaning: the boom extends toward heaven, the planes wheels will kiss the earth again, and somewhere between them you learn what it means to be centered.
In the boom pod I learned it without a name. Not the shallow breath of panic, but the deep, steady breath that keeps you present when alignment is critical and everything around you is moving.
I started showing guests this pattern in Joshua Tree. We’d watch the sun set at different points along the horizon throughout the year—farther south in winter (toward Hema), farther north in summer (toward ʻĀkau). The desert horizon became our calendar, the Sun’s position our clock.
It happened on an ordinary night in Joshua Tree. Regular guests, regular sky. I was doing what I’d done five hundred times before—lifting my green laser, tracing constellations, pointing upward.
But that night, mid-sentence, I became aware of something I’d been ignoring for years: my own heartbeat. Steady. Patient. Waiting beneath all the pointing and explaining.
Reading a book about Polynesian wayfinding: the Hawaiian words for the six directions. Not just labels like our English ‘north, south, east, west’—but words that held the essence of what each direction meant.
Hikina. To rise. The east, where the sun is born each morning.
Komohana. To set, to descend. The west, where light returns to darkness.
ʻĀkau. God, deity. The north, the place of the sacred and eternal.
Hema. Left, south. The warm direction, the place of life and growth.
I set the book down and walked outside to the desert. The sun was setting— Komohana—painting the horizon in colors that only come when light prepares to leave. And I realized: I’d been teaching ‘right to rise, left to leave’ for years without knowing the Hawaiians had woven this same wisdom into their language itself.
When I first read those words, something clicked. Not in my mind, but deeper. In my chest. In the place where the boom pod had taught me to hold six reference points in perfect balance breathing through my heart. My body recognized what my mind was still learning: I’d been living this pattern for years without knowing its name. The recognition wasn’t intellectual—it was deep in your heart, the way you recognize a song you haven’t heard since childhood but your body still knows every note.
That night, after reading about the Hawaiian directions, I stood in the desert and turned slowly, naming each direction as I faced it:
Hikina. The east, where stars were rising even now. The place of my morning, my military years, my climb toward something I thought was light.
Komohana. The west, where stars were setting, leaving. The place I was learning to inhabit—the afternoon, the descent, the return to what had always been true.
ʻĀkau. The north, where Hōkūpaʻa—Polaris—held steady above me. The fixed point, the eternal, the divine that doesn’t change while everything else circles.
Hema. The south, where the galactic core blazed in summer. The warm direction, the place of life and breath.
I stood at the center, the place where all four directions meet. Now add above and below while breathing into your heart.
Not lost. Not found. Just here—at the intersection of rising and setting, sacred and earthly, eternal and temporal.
That’s what the six directions teach: You are always standing at the center of your own experience. The directions don’t tell you where to go. They tell you where you are.
In the boom pod, I navigated by coordinates: numbers anyone could read, positions anyone could find and everybody agreed upon. But standing in the desert that night, I finally understood what I’d been missing: the difference between knowing where you are and knowing whose land you’re standing on.
When I teach the six directions now—Hikina, Komohana, ʻĀkau, Hema, Luna, Lalo, and Puʻuwai at the center—I’m not just naming coordinates. I’m acknowledging relationships. The east isn’t just where the sun rises; it’s where my own beginnings live. The west isn’t just where things set; it’s where I’m learning to release what I’ve been carrying. The directions become personal. Alive.
The instruments only showed one layer. The experience was teaching all of them at once.
In the boom pod, I thought I was monitoring the aircraft’s position through space. But really, I was the still point—the seventh direction—and the whole operation was moving relative to where I held center. North and south, east and west, up and down—all of them moved relative to the place I maintained. My job wasn’t to move through the six directions. My job was to embody the seventh so completely that the other six knew where they were.
I used to think I was looking for the center, trying to find my way back to some still point I’d lost. But the Hawaiians knew better. You don’t find the center. You become it. And once you do, everything else knows where it belongs.
The Hawaiian teaching showed me this. The boom pod confirmed it—every successful refueling required me to see from the receiver pilot’s center, my pilots center, not just my own.
That’s what I didn’t understand during all those years in the boom pod: refueling wasn’t just about fuel transfer. It was about maintaining pono while suspended between worlds—staying centered in turbulence, honoring what both aircraft needed, keeping all six reference points in relationship while holding the seventh point steady.
I think about that woman on my tour again—fifty-three, asking what it meant to be on the leaving side of her life. Now I’d tell her: You’re not just on the leaving side. You’re standing at the center of Hikina and Komohana, rising and leaving, morning and evening. And your job isn’t to pick one direction and walk that way forever. Your job is to hold the center—to maintain pono between where you’ve been and where you’re going, between what you’re releasing and what you’re receiving.
That’s not the leaving side of life. That’s the living center of it.
—–
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 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.
⸻
Standing in the seventh direction—puʻuwai, the heart—I finally understood what five hundred nights had been showing me all along. The five principles I’d been teaching weren’t abstract philosophy. They were this pattern, lived.
Out here in Joshua Tree, standing under the stars with guests, I started teaching this differently.
I’d still point to the Milky Way, still trace constellations. But then I’d stop. Lower the laser. And say something like:
‘Feel your heartbeat for a moment.’
People would go still. Some would press a hand to their chest. Others would just close their eyes.
‘That rhythm—that steady pulse—it’s following the same pattern as everything we’ve been looking at tonight. The Moon waxing and waning, the light also rising and leaving. The Sun tracing its figure-eight across the year. The stars rising and leaving in their ancient paths.
‘The Hawaiian people taught that the heart—puʻuwai—is the seventh direction, the center where all the others meet. When I was a boom operator, I learned that same principle at thirty thousand feet: six reference points meeting in one center where connection happens and the six are always communicated from there.
‘The coordinates have always pointed here.’
I’d tap my chest.
‘The center of the All has always been right where you stand—beating quietly in your chest.’
And I’d watch people realize: they’d been searching the sky for something they were carrying the whole time.
But I haven’t always held this center. There was a night—guests arriving late, equipment malfunctioning, clouds rolling in just as we were about to start, my own anxiety spiraling about whether this tour would ‘work’—when I stood under those same stars and felt nothing but static. My heart racing, not steady. The six directions pulling me apart instead of meeting in a seventh. I’d been teaching coherence for years, and that night I couldn’t find it in myself so focused on the outside world and the clouds above.
I went through the motions. Pointed out constellations. Explained the science. But when I asked people to feel their heartbeat, I couldn’t feel mine—not as rhythm, just as noise. I was performing the teaching instead of living it.
After they left, I sat alone in the desert, frustrated with myself. And then I remembered: the center isn’t something you achieve once and keep forever. It’s something you return to, again and again, through the simple practice of breathing into your heart and looking up. The seventh direction doesn’t stay put just because you found it yesterday. You have to find it fresh each time, through “ha”—your breath—through the willingness to admit you’ve lost your way and need to begin again.
That night taught me something the successful nights never could: the teaching isn’t about perfect alignment. It’s about the practice of returning to center when you’ve lost it. About being honest when the six directions feel like chaos instead of coming together. About letting failure be the teacher that success can never be.
The next night, I began differently. I told the guests about losing my center the night before. And I watched something shift in the group—relief, maybe, that even the guide gets lost sometimes. That the teaching isn’t about having it all figured out, but about knowing how to find your way back home.
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 embarrassment 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, mothers and daughters, through every act of love that refused to let embarrassment and 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.
Our daily lives are filled with moments like this—ordinary afternoons that become extraordinary when love moves through them. These are the stories the ancients knew had to be remembered, so they wrote them in starlight where they could never be forgotten. Not myths about gods and heroes, but truths about fathers and daughters, mothers and sons about dignity and sacrifice, about the choice to stand shoulder to shoulder when someone needs you most.
The ancient wisdom isn’t somewhere else, in some other time. It’s here. In a father’s stumble. In a boy’s relief. In the choice to meet shame with grace and transform humiliation into a gift.
That day, my father completely changed the world—my world—with one graceful, selfless act.
In the years since that afternoon, I have searched the stars for these same lessons, discovering that each one is another facet of that ancient instruction—Know Thyself—that kept appearing in every tradition I studied. What my father showed me that day, what the etymology revealed, what the stars keep teaching—they all pointed to the same invitation: to know who you are, to accept what you cannot change, and to choose love when it matters most.
What follows are the principles I discovered through 500 nights under the stars, through loss and wonder, through my father’s grace and my mother’s last sunset. These became MY compass—not universal laws, but the distillation of what this journey taught this particular stargazer. Your principles might be entirely different, shaped by different skies and different experiences. And that’s exactly as it should be. What he did in those few seconds showed me everything I would spend the rest of my life learning to name:
Know yourself well enough to act without hesitation.
Surrender – Let go of what you are not, what you cannot control, and navigate what you can.
Walk through acceptance—meet the moment as it is, then offer more when you have given all you have.
Look up— Experience wonder and awe by witnessing creation creating.
Stand shoulder to shoulder they can see what you can not and you can see what they can not.
The Anishinaabe peoples have a teaching about this. They call it the wolf trail—what astronomers call the ecliptic. Seven wolves traveling together across the sky: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
Each wolf moves independently, following its own path, expressing its own nature. The Sun blazes steady. The Moon waxes and wanes. Mercury races ahead. Venus shines brightest. Mars glows red with purpose. Jupiter moves with ancient patience. Saturn holds the boundary.
And yet none of them ever leaves the pack. They all travel the same path across the sky—the wolf trail—moving at different speeds, in different ways, but always together. Always part of the pattern.
Together they create the environment where survival and thriving happen—individual and unified, separate and woven in. Each wolf essential. Each wolf free. Each wolf held by the pack.
This is how humans were meant to navigate too. Not by all seeing the same pattern, but by standing shoulder to shoulder and sharing what we see from where we stand.
You see what I cannot. I see what you cannot. Together, we see more than either of us could alone.
I think about those guests on my tours—Australia, India, Japan, Nigeria, Mexico, Canada. We stand under the same stars, but each person sees something different. The Lakota’s bear isn’t more correct than the Greek bear—it’s a different angle on the same truth. The Southern Cross doesn’t replace Polaris—it serves a different horizon. Your constellation isn’t wrong because it differs from mine. It’s necessary because you’re standing where I’m not, experiencing what I’m not.
When we demand that everyone see the sky the same way, trace the same patterns, tell the same stories—we don’t create unity. We create blindness. We lose the very diversity of perspective that allows the pack to survive.
The wolves don’t all become the Sun. They don’t abandon their unique paths to follow a single experience. They honor what makes each one distinct while traveling the same sacred trail together.
Like those wolves, like the perspectives we each carry from our in situ points, we are both independent and inseparable.
The sky has been teaching this since before humans existed, you don’t have to abandon who you are to belong. You don’t have to see what I see to walk beside me. You just express and know your center, hold your path, and trust that the pack is moving together even when each wolf travels at its own pace.
Recognizing that your distinct perspective and theirs—both are necessary for the whole trail to be visible.
Seven wolves. Over eight billion humans on earth now, same teaching.
Find your center. Honor what makes you, you. Let go of what you are not. Travel the sacred trail together.
The pack survives because each wolf remains itself.
My father didn’t fix what happened on that baseball field. I still peed my pants. The embarrassment was still real. He couldn’t change that.
What he changed was the relationship.
He repositioned himself— from observer in the stands to participant on the field.
He repositioned the focal point— from my surprise and embarrassment to his clumsiness.
He repositioned the story—from “the kid who peed himself” to “the dad who spilled his drink.”
The situation didn’t change. How we all stood in relation to it did.
And suddenly there was room for me to breathe.
Looking back now, I realize: I’d been seeing this pattern my whole life. I just didn’t know what I was looking at.
The horse already knew where he was going. The guide didn’t try to control him. She didn’t try to control me. She just said “Sit heavy,” gave me permission to trust what was happening, then stepped back.
She changed her position— from controller to witness— and suddenly the relationship between me and the horse could work itself out.
—–
That moose in Alaska didn’t need me to understand it. I couldn’t build one. I couldn’t explain one. All I could do was laugh at the absurdity of thinking I, anyone could.
I couldn’t change the moose. I could only change my relationship to mystery itself— from trying to control it to surrendering to it.
—–
In the boom pod, I thought my job was to fix the aircraft’s drift. Get them back on course. Correct the error.
But that’s not what I was doing.
I was holding my center steady so the relationship between tanker and receiver could align, so arrival and destination came together.
The aircraft didn’t need fixing. The relationship needed adjusting.
When I held my position, fuel could flow.
—–
Every village on the Camino, the scene, the buildings, the people were already there. Ancient churches. Worn cobblestones. Marks carved by pilgrims who walked centuries before us.
I couldn’t change what was there. I could only change my relationship to it—rush past with my head down, or slow down enough to witness what the caravan had left for us.
When we slowed down, we saw: here is rest, here is food, here is what you need.
—–
Standing shoulder to shoulder with that younger version of me—the boom operator with the sextant, trying so hard to get it exactly right—I used to think he was failing.
Three degrees off. Again.
Now I see: he was learning. The drift wasn’t the problem. Thinking the drift meant something was wrong with him, was the problem.
I can’t fix him. I can’t go back and make him understand sooner.
But I can change my relationship to him—from judgment to respect, from control to recognition that he was doing the best he could with what he could see.
Nacha So Nacha Anno. Not the same, and yet not another.
—–
This is what I’d been getting wrong for years.
I thought helping meant fixing. Changing people. Solving their problems.
But what if the question isn’t “How do I fix them?” What if it’s “How do I change the relationship?”
Not: What’s wrong with them?
But: Where am I standing in relation to this?
Not: How do I make them different?
But: What becomes possible if I move here instead?
—–
Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is stumble—make yourself the temporary center so someone else can slip away from the spotlight.
Sometimes it’s standing where they stood—occupying the position they just left so they can see what it looked like from there and you can see a little bit of what they see, saw.
Sometimes it’s holding your position steady, like Polaris, while everything else moves.
Sometimes it’s stepping back and saying “sit heavy”—giving permission, then witnessing what unfolds.
Sometimes it’s slowing down enough to see what’s already there instead of rushing past it.
Sometimes it’s laughing at your own thoughts of control.
—–
What the Stars Have Been Teaching
Stand outside tonight and find Orion’s Belt. Three stars in a row.
Alnitak. Alnilam. Mintaka.
They’re not trying to fix each other. Alnitak doesn’t look at Alnilam and think: “You’re too close, move over there.” Mintaka doesn’t judge the other two for being brighter.
They just hold their positions.
And because each one stays exactly where it is, you can find your way. The whole constellation makes sense because no star abandoned its place to become another star.
—–
Now look at the Big Dipper. Seven stars forming a pattern everyone recognizes.
But here’s what most people don’t know: those seven stars aren’t actually close to each other. Some are 80 light-years away. Others are 124 light-years away. They’re not a group traveling together through space.
They just appear that way from where you stand.
The pattern exists because of the relationship between their positions and yours, it’s an illusion.
If you moved to a different planet, the Big Dipper would disappear. Different stars would align. New patterns would emerge.
The stars didn’t change. Your position did. And that changed everything you could see.
—–
This is what the sky teaches every single night:
You can’t make the stars move to where you want them to be.
You can only change where you stand in relation to them.
And when you do—when you shift your position just slightly—the entire pattern of what can be experienced changes.
—–
Polaris holds steady in the north. Not because it’s trying to be helpful. Not because it’s fixing anything. Just because that’s where it is.
And because it stays there, every other star’s movement makes sense. Rising in the east. Leaving in the west. Circling the pole.
Navigation becomes possible not because Polaris moves, but because it doesn’t from where we breathe in.
—–
The same is true for you.
When you find your center and hold it—not rigidly, but with presence—you become a reference point.
Not because you’re fixing anyone.
Not because you have all the answers.
Just because you’re here. Located. Present. Standing in relation to what is.
And sometimes, that’s exactly what allows someone else to find their way.
—–
My father changed where he stood.
The horse trail guide stepped back.
I stopped trying to understand the moose.
The boom operator held his position.
The Camino pilgrims slowed down.
I looked at my younger self with respect instead of frustration.
The stars held their positions while I learned mine.
Different situations. Same pattern.
You can’t change what is.
You can only change how you stand in relation to it.
And that changes everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Something is always already there wherever you arrive.
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 by interacting with the past.
Or more accurately: how the present creates the futures past for the next traveler to engage.
The caravan never stops. Stars rise in the east, reach that transition point overhead, set in the west. New stars follow the same path. The journey continues whether we notice or not.
Watch it tonight. Find three stars in a row—Orion’s Belt in winter, Altair and its companions in summer, any line of stars traveling together. See how the first leads, the second follows, the third benefits from both.
That’s your life. That’s everyone’s life.
The first star is every ancestor, every elder, every person who walked this path before you and left wisdom carved in traditions, stories, cautionary tales, hard-won knowledge.
The second star is every teacher, every mentor, every contemporary walking beside you, reading what came before, adding their own marks, showing you how to navigate.
The third star is you, right now, with the benefit of all that accumulated knowledge—if you slow down enough to witness the scene, to read the marks, to see what those before you learned.
The sky has been showing us how to live in relationship across time for billions of years.
The past isn’t just behind me—it’s held in everything around me, if I pay attention.
When I arrive anywhere, the past has already been there. If I slow down enough to witness the scene—really see it, really pay attention—I can make choices based on that knowledge. Choices that benefit not just me, but everyone.
And the future isn’t somewhere else. It’s the next person rising in the east right now, looking for the marks I’m leaving in this present moment. My choices today become their destiny tomorrow.
You are not walking alone. The first star walks beside you through the marks it left. The second star walks beside you through the wisdom it added. And someone is rising behind you right now, walking beside you through time even though you’ll never meet them. Every choice you make, you make in community—with everyone who came before and everyone who will follow. The caravan is always shoulder to shoulder, even across centuries, even across the vast distances of the sky.
Destiny asks: What marks did those before me leave? Am I paying attention?
Choice asks: How will I walk this path? What will I add to what I inherited?
Legacy asks: What am I carving for those who follow? Will my marks help them or hurt them?
The caravan keeps moving.
That transition point at the top of the sky—the moment between rising and leaving—that’s where you stand right now. The hinge between what was and what will be. Between receiving and giving. Between learning and teaching.
The question is: are you paying attention to what those before you carved? And are you carving anything worth reading for those who follow?
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 leave. My father stood between them, teaching what he couldn’t say.
What rises must also leave.
What leaves 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 and my moms 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 and mother 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.
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.
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 loved.
That night was the last time we looked at the sky together. But standing in the desert months later, the stars began showing me what ‘leaving’ actually means…
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.
Tomorrow night, light from a star 50 light-years away will arrive—light that left when humans first stepped onto the Moon.
Sirius shows you the world as it was in 2015.
Vega, 26 years ago, shows you the millennium’s dawn.
Your own light is streaming outward too: who and where you were 26 years ago is just now arriving at Vega.
The glow of your city, your birthday candles, every campfire you’ve sat beside—all expanding into space.
Photons do not turn back.
They carry every human moment outward, forever.
We are forever light, traveling.
My father is 84 now.
The light of him at 58—whatever he was doing 26 years ago—is arriving at Vega right now.
The light of him at 76 is reaching Sirius.
In approximately 500 years, his birth will arrive at Betelgeuse: that first breath, that first cry, washing over a dying star.
And in 13.8 billion years, every moment of his entire life will reach the edge of the observable universe—the furthest boundary of what exists.
Every age of him is expressing somewhere, all the time.
My father at 2, taking his first steps—that’s happening right now, 82 light-years away.
My father at 18, becoming himself—66 light-years out.
My father at 40, in the thick of life—44 light-years distant.
He’s not a single point moving through time—he’s 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 else.
Your grandmother laughing in 1952 is expressing 72 light-years away.
Your child’s first word is just beginning its journey.
Shakespeare writing Hamlet is 420 light-years out, still traveling.
The Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree, Jesus in Galilee, the first human to make fire—all of them are still expressing, still arriving somewhere new, always.
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, but it’s not 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 light of you or me—housed temporarily in this physical body like sunlight stored inside trees and released when we have a campfire—is also released when the light of you has run out of fuel and expanded so much that it can no longer be restrained.
Like a star that goes supernova, exploding and sending its physical remnants across the galaxy to become new planets and stars and people like us, we also go supernova.
We just call it death.
Light-as-visibility leaves no trace.
But the physical trace of what the light allowed to survive—that remains, even without the light that once allowed us to see it.
Life is how awareness becomes visible.
Death is when it no longer needs to be.
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.
Like a dream: you are aware, but everything is different, and there’s no remorse for what once was.
Breathe out
Nothing meaningful is lost—only the way it was seen.
The more deeply you know your seasons, the more deeply you know yourself. Ancient Japan divided the year into seventy-two microseasons, each only a few days long—east wind melts the ice, frogs begin to sing, dew glistens white on grass. To live in such rhythm was to find your own reflection in the natural world.
Years before I learned this, I had read Tristan Gooley’s Natural Navigator books. He wrote that everything is a map—plants, animals, clouds, stars, wind, water—nothing random, nothing wasted. At the time, I filed it away as theory, a clever survival trick to be remembered if I ever needed it. But it wasn’t until Joshua Tree that it became real.
For several years my wife Molli and I lived in the Mojave Desert. Each morning before sunrise, we walked around a pond tucked inside the wild land of a golf course. The air was still cool, the moon still awake, and the desert felt raw and safely wild, like it was letting us in on secrets. A cool cheek told us where the wind came from. A shift in bird calls revealed the presence of coyotes beyond the reeds. The pond itself mirrored the phases of the moon—bright and sharp in fullness, soft and hidden in waning. These were not coincidences. They were stories in an older language.
Molli began naming them. She gave the desert its own microseasons, as distinct as the seventy-two in the old Japanese almanac. Turkey Vultures return/leave. Week the Pleiades rose in the sky and left the sky. She watched the moon’s moods as well. At first I thought she was bringing herself closer to nature. Now over two years, I realized she was building a map as well—not in diagrams or lines, but in rhythm.
One morning stands out still: we saw the star Fomalhaut rising in the east. And that very week, bullfrogs began croaking in the pond.
Later, I would discover something that stopped me cold: medieval Arabic astronomers called Fomalhaut aḍ-Ḍifdaʿ al-Awwal—“the First Frog.” When it rose at dusk in autumn, frogs began croaking after the summer drought in the rivers and marshes of the Jordan river.
7,500 miles away, in the Northern Territory of Australia, Wardaman elders teach that when you see Menggen riding high in the sky, you know Dungdung—the great Frog Mother—has “opened her mouth.” Water is moving again. The land is breathing. The giant burrowing frogs emerge from their summer sleep and start their deafening chorus.
Two completely independent traditions. Same star. Same biological event. Same teaching written in starlight: when Fomalhaut rises, the frogs sing.
This is what Tristan Gooley meant when he said everything is a map. The stars don’t just mark time—they mark what’s alive. When Fomalhaut rises, frogs croak. When the Pleiades disappear, certain plants bloom, when they rise the new year begins in Aotearoa, New Zealand. When Orion’s belt appears, winter returns. The sky isn’t separate from the earth. It’s the earth’s calendar, written in light.
Standing in the Joshua Tree desert that morning, Molli and I were witnessing what humans have witnessed for thousands of years on every continent. The sky and the earth speaking the same language. Fomalhaut rising. Bullfrogs croaking. The season naming itself twice.
Molli grinned—that grin that still undoes me after all these years—and said, “It’s bullfrog croaking season.”
I fell in love with her all over again in that moment. Not for the first time, and certainly not the last. I fall in love with her every time she sees what I miss, every time she names what I can’t, every time she grins at the universe like it’s told her a secret and she’s deciding whether to share it with me.
Those mornings taught me that marriage is its own kind of navigation. You learn to read each other the way Molli learned to read the desert—paying attention to shifts too subtle for words, seasons that arrive before you expect them, rhythms that require patience and presence to perceive. The desert was our teacher, but she has always been mine.
Campfire Song Spiral: The First Time
The first time I saw Molli, my world stopped. In that single breath-held moment, I knew—with the same certainty I knew the sky was endless—that I wanted every remaining day of my life with her. That was acceptance in its purest form: the simple, overwhelming receiving of a gift from the mystery in the form of destiny I would spend forever being grateful for.
Thirty-one years later never spending a single night apart, I am still getting better at noticing how many different ways she expresses her love. Still discovering new ways she moves through the world with grace I can barely comprehend. The stars are that consistent, the stories are buried in them and in them are the seasons and how to thrive shoulder to shoulder. Marriage has seasons too—some blazing with the kind of brightness that makes you forget darkness ever existed, others quieter, heavy with the comfortable silence of two people who’ve learned to breathe in rhythm. And I’ve learned this: one act of acceptance, one declaration of love, one moment of choosing her—it’s never enough. When challenges arrive, when life gets complicated, when we hit the rough patches along the way in every area of our lives we must offer more acceptance. And then more still. More space to allow the situation to unfold to express the destiny of design before us and discover our choice within it
This isn’t the conditional love of contracts and scorecards— you do this, I’ll do that, and if either of us fails, it’s over. That’s not love. That’s negotiation. That’s a transaction. What I’ve learned under these stars is that real acceptance means she is free. Free to be exactly who she is in any situation, in any season, on any day—even the ones I don’t understand. Free to change, to grow, to become whoever she’s becoming without fear that I’ll withdraw my love if she doesn’t match some image I had in my head. Free to express the truth of who she is without ever wondering, Will he still love me if I show him this part of myself? The answer is always yes. Always has been. Always will be.
I see you. All of you. And I’m not going anywhere
That was the moment Tristan Gooley’s words returned, not as something written in a book, but as something written in us. What had once looked like coincidences was now a pattern, and we had finally learned enough to read it.
By the end of those three years, we had come to know ourselves through that pond, through the desert, through the sky and the moon. Destiny named the time. Choice was how we lived it.
What I learned: acceptance doesn’t mean giving up. It means paying such close attention to the rhythms around you that you know when to push and when to yield. The desert taught me when to walk and when to wait. The pond taught me when to be full and when to be empty. The bullfrogs taught me that everything arrives in its season, not on my schedule.
Your rhythms will be different. Your seasons will follow different patterns. What matters is learning to notice and read them where you stand.
When Molli turned forty and I turned fifty, we walked the Camino de Santiago—500 miles across northern Spain. Thirty-three days. Wake up. Walk. Wake up. Walk.
The path is older than Christianity. The Druids walked this same route long before the first cathedral was built, following the Milky Way stretched across the sky from the coast of France to the coast of Spain, leading them west toward the edge of the known world.
We were just the latest in an ancient caravan.
We didn’t choose the route. Pilgrims carved it centuries ago, marked it with yellow arrows and scallop shells. The path was already there, waiting.
That’s destiny. We could walk it or not, but we couldn’t change where it went.
Some days it climbed mountains. Other days it dropped into valleys so beautiful we forgot we were tired. We didn’t choose the terrain—only whether we kept walking.
Every morning, the same choice: walk today, or quit? Surrender to the route. Navigate your response.
Every village, the scene was already there. Ancient churches. Worn cobblestones. Marks carved by pilgrims who walked in 1200, in 800, before time.
We’d slow down, witness what was present. A fountain when we needed water. A café when our energy failed. The marks told us: here is rest, here is food, pay attention.
If we rushed through, heads down, we’d miss it. But if we slowed down enough to witness the scene, we’d see what the caravan had left for us.
Every night, we’d add our own marks. A note in the hostel journal. A conversation with another walker. Leaving something for the next star rising behind us.
We walked with strangers who became friends. Germany, Australia, Korea, Brazil—different languages, different reasons, all following the same yellow arrows.
Some days we’d walk together for hours. Other days alone. But we’d see the same faces at the hostel that night—shoulder to shoulder again, comparing blisters, laughing about the hill that nearly broke us.
And we walked with everyone who ever walked this path. The Druids following the Milky Way. The medieval pilgrims. The modern seekers. All of us in the same caravan, separated by centuries but joined by the same rhythm: wake up, walk, wake up, walk.
One body. Many walkers. All walking home.
I thought we were walking to Santiago. But Santiago was never the point.
The point was the walking itself. The daily practice of waking, choosing, moving forward even when everything hurt. Slowing down enough to see what was already there. Looking up when the day ended. Walking beside strangers and discovering we’re all the same caravan.
The Camino didn’t teach us something new. It taught us what the stars had been teaching all along: this is how you live.
Wake up. See clearly who you are and where you stand.
Surrender to the path you’re given, then choose how you walk it.
Accept what’s already there and keep moving.
Look up. Remember you’re part of the light.
Walk shoulder to shoulder. You’re never doing this alone.
Five hundred miles. Thirty-three days.
When we finally reached Santiago and stood in the cathedral plaza, I realized: we’d been walking the answer the whole time. Not toward it. Not searching for it. Just walking it, step by step, under the same stars that have guided every seeker home.
The teaching isn’t something you learn. It’s something you walk.
For years I thought I was searching for my place in these patterns—trying to locate myself among the stars, the seasons, the rhythms I was witnessing. But standing in the desert with Molli, watching Fomalhaut rise as the bullfrogs sang, walking the Camino under the ancient Milky Way, I finally understood: I wasn’t searching for my place in the pattern.
I was the place where the pattern became conscious of itself.
The Question That Wouldn’t Let Go
For five hundred nights I stood under the stars and still couldn’t answer the simplest question: Where am I?
Not my coordinates—those were trivial. 34°N, 118°W. Los Angeles. Third planet circling a star inside what we call the Milky Way Galaxy.
But where was I really?
Night after night I scanned the sky for an answer. Arcturus burning orange in spring. Orion sweeping across winter. Polaris fixed and faithful in the north, the first friend every modern era navigator learns.
I began memorizing the heavens—names, distances, myths—hoping that if I learned the stars well enough, they’d reveal my place among them.
But the more I looked up, the more lost I felt.
The Two Darknesses
There are two darknesses.
The first is ordinary—the absence between stars, the shadow behind mountains, the gap where light hasn’t touched. You can point to this darkness: there, between Betelgeuse and Rigel. There, in the moon’s trailing shadow.
The second is different.
It’s the darkness that comes when you don’t know where you are—not lost on a map, but lost in myself. A kind of directionless feeling that has no reference points, no relationships, no “this relative to that.”
A darkness that is everywhere and nowhere at once.
You can stare into it forever and find nothing to hold.
That was the darkness humanity seems to travel through, even with 500 nights of stars overhead. I knew every constellation. I could find any planet. I could trace the sky’s slow turning in my sleep.
But I still didn’t know where I was.
Because I didn’t understand the nature of the question.
What the Stars Actually Show
Watch the sky long enough and the stars teach a quiet lesson:
They show you where the darkness is not.
Here is Arcturus—bright, orange, 37 light-years away. Not darkness here.
Here is Polaris—steady, northern, the hinge of the whole wheeling sky. Not darkness here.
Here is Orion—hunter, belt, nebula, legend. Not darkness here.
The stars don’t illuminate the darkness. They outline it. They teach by negation: not here, not here, not here.
They reveal everything except what I was trying to find.
Because what I was seeking can’t be located “out there.”
The Seventh Direction
The Hawaiian tradition says the heart—puʻuwai—sits at the center of the six directions: north, south, east, west, up, down.
For years I treated that as a pretty poetic metaphor. The heart as compass rose.
Then one night, Orion high and the Santa Ana winds blowing warm through the California hills, something clicked:
It wasn’t poetry. It was physics.
The six directions don’t exist independently like some grid waiting to be discovered. They arise from the center. From the perceiver. From consciousness.
Watch:
I breathe into my heart—slow, steady—and suddenly the world has a here.
From that here, front emerges. Behind me, back. To each side, left and right. Above, sky. Below, earth.
The instant I establish center, the six directions spring into being.
Not because I found them.
Because they emerge from me.
You Are Not a Coordinate
This was the mistake I kept making.
I searched for myself as if I were a findable object—a point among other points. A place I could mark on a map of space.
But you cannot discover yourself that way.
Because you’re not a coordinate.
You are the origin point from which coordinates arise.
Think back to the boom pod—the refueling station I operated in the Air Force. I thought my job was to track six reference points: tanker, probe, drogue, relative wind, closure rate, vertical separation.
But that’s not what I was doing.
I was the seventh reference point. The still center that gave meaning to the other six. Without me establishing HERE, none of the others had a “there.”
The refueling wasn’t something happening “out there.”
It happened because I held center.
Mintaka’s Teaching
Mintaka sits almost exactly on the celestial equator—the imaginary line that circles the middle of the sky.
I thought Mintaka was revealing its own centrality.
But Mintaka was pointing toward something more subtle:
Every coordinate system needs an origin point.
A place where measurement begins. A HERE from which THERE becomes measurable.
The celestial equator isn’t etched in the sky. It’s generated by consciousness choosing: this is zero. This is the reference plane. All else radiates from here.
Mintaka wasn’t the center.
Mintaka was showing me the pattern of centering.
The Physics of Presence
Physics says there is no absolute reference frame. Einstein proved it. Each observer generates their own coordinate system. Space-time curves around massive objects—not because objects exist in space, but because they shape the space around them.
Your consciousness does the same.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
When you breathe into your heart and establish HERE, you don’t discover a location—you create how everything relates.
Front and back arise because your existence is established here where you breathe.
Left and right emerge because you orient.
Above and below exist because you stand between earth and sky.
The directions are not pre-existing. They are relationships that appear the moment you establish center.
This is why the Hawaiian tradition places puʻuwai at the origin. Not as a point within the directions, but as the heart from which all directions arise.
You do not navigate directions.
You give birth to them.
Darkness Is Dark Because It Has No Relationship
This is the hinge of everything:
Darkness isn’t dark because of the absence of light.
It’s dark because of the absence of relationship.
When you search outside yourself for your location, you attempt to exist as a point in a relationless void—a coordinate floating in unmeasured blackness.
That is why searching makes you feel more lost.
You’re trying to find yourself as an object when you are the origin of finding.
But the moment you breathe into your heart—
the moment HERE is chosen—
everything changes.
The darkness doesn’t vanish.
It becomes darkness-in-relation-to-you.
The stars stop being random points.
They become Arcturus-in-my-western-sky.
Polaris-anchored-above-me.
Orion-rising-from-my-horizo.
Lost and found aren’t opposites.
They only exist because you exist to experience them
Mitakuye Oyasin – All My Relations
The Lakota say Mitakuye Oyasin.
Usually rendered as “all my relations.”
But I think it means something more elemental:
All relations radiate from here.
Not only “I am connected to everything.”
But “relationship arises from centered awareness.”
Once HERE is established—once presence is chosen—everything enters into relationship.
Not because anything out there changed.
Because the origin point woke up.
This realization showed up everywhere in my life:
Boom pod: I wasn’t tracking six points. I was anchoring them.
Otis’s house: I didn’t follow the six directions. I generated them.
My father’s stumble: He didn’t find a new meaning. He changed how we all stood in relation to what happened.
The Camino: I didn’t walk through space. With each step, I created here.
Five hundred nights: I wasn’t trying to locate myself. I was learning that I’m the one from whom location arises.
The Three Questions Return
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 unknown, the mystery, the mysterious, the All, God.
The universe noticing itself through a pair of eyes.
Not Lost, Just Here
I am not lost in the darkness.
I am the place where darkness discovers itself.
I am not a point among stars.
I am the origin from which stars become meaningful.
I am not searching for center.
I am center, learning to recognize itself.
Five hundred nights taught me this.
And every breath into the heart confirms it:
You are not in the universe.
You are the point where the universe becomes aware of itself.
Presence is not something you find.
It’s what remains when you stop looking outward.
From that presence, everything connects.
All directions.
All distances.
All light and shadow.
All relations radiating from here.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
How This Changes Everything
If you are the origin point:
Lostness isn’t about place. It’s about forgetting what you are.
Finding yourself isn’t searching harder. It’s stopping.
Loneliness isn’t absence of others. It’s absence of center.
Meaning isn’t discovered. It arises.
Death doesn’t erase people. It shifts them from coordinates to relationships.
Power isn’t positional.
It’s what emerges when you stand centered.
The Practice Is Simple
When you feel lost:
Stop searching outside yourself.
Breathe into your heart.
Establish HERE.
Feel the six directions arise—front/back, left/right, above/below.
Watch how the world re-enters relationship the moment you stop being a coordinate and become an origin.
And here’s the astonishing part:
When two people do this simultaneously—two centers, both awake—they don’t collapse into one. Something new appears between them. Something neither could generate alone.
Now imagine eight billion centers.
This isn’t philosophy.
Or meditation technique.
Or spiritual bypass.
This is consciousness doing what consciousness does.
What the Stars Were Saying All Along
Across 500 nights, the stars whispered one message:
Stop trying to find yourself in us.
We can’t tell you where you are.
WHERE only becomes possible after you create HERE.
Breathe.
Center.
Generate the directions.
Then—only then—we become Arcturus-relative-to-you, Polaris-steady-from-your-ground, Orion-rising-in-your-sky.
We aren’t the cure for your lostness.
We’re the relationship made possible once you remember you are not lost.
You are here.
You have always been here.
And from here, all relations radiate.
I quite literally have a relationship with everything I experience with my senses both scene and unseen, known and unknown.
Closing: The Darkness Speaks
I no longer fear the darkness between stars.
I know what it is:
The canvas.
The cradle.
The mystery from which all light—including the light reading these words—emerges.
You are not lost in that darkness.
You are the darkness learning to see.
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 and you are wrong. 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.
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 and now is a ringing in my ears that never stops. 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.
Here’s what the sextant taught me that I couldn’t have learned any other way:
You stare into the darkness to find the light -stars. You must find your center before you can find the center out there.
If you stand in the same place at the same time next year, they’ll be there—exactly where they were before, to the naked eye. Arcturus rising in the east at 9 PM in July. Orion climbing over the ridge in December. The Pleiades marking the seasons. Faithful. Patient. Unchanged by my confusion or clarity, my precision or my drift.
The stars in the sky don’t lie, they hold their pattern while I learn mine.
That young boom operator needed that. He needed to know that even when the aircraft drifted seventeen miles off course, even when the winds shifted and the math had to be recalculated—the stars themselves hadn’t moved. They were exactly where they were supposed to be, waiting to be found again.
What changes isn’t the stars. It’s my position relative to them.
And that’s the practice: not chasing the stars, but noticing where I am in relationship to what remains constant. Not demanding that the universe bend toward my confusion, but learning to orient myself toward what I can trust.
The stars don’t drift. I do.
The stars don’t get lost. I do.
The stars don’t need correction. I do.
And thank God for that.
Because if the stars drifted too—if the reference points kept moving, if the pattern kept changing, if nothing held steady—I’d have no way to find my way back.
But they don’t. They won’t. They haven’t to the naked eye for thousands of years. Only we have.
So when I take my position check—sextant then, breath now—I’m not measuring whether the stars are still there. They always are. I’m measuring whether I’m still paying attention. Whether I’m still willing to notice the drift and make the small correction.
That’s the gift the stars give: not certainty that I’ll never drift, but certainty that I can always find my way back.
This is true not just with past versions of myself, but with every person I meet. When we stand shoulder to shoulder under the same stars, we’re each seeing half the sky. You see what’s in front of you; I see what’s in front of me. The hula hoop makes this literal: half the circle visible, half hidden. But we know the whole circle is there. We know the stars shine beneath our feet even though we can’t see them.
That’s why we need each other. Not to agree on what we see, but to share what we see. To recognize that your half-view and my half-view are both true—and both incomplete.
These days, I still take position checks. Not with a sextant anymore, but with simpler tools: a hand on my chest, noticing my breath, a pause before responding. The rhythm is the same—drift, notice, correct, drift again. Not because I’m broken, but because that’s what it means to be awake and moving through the world.
Sometimes I look up at Arcturus rising in the east and remember that young boom operator trying so hard to get it exactly right. And I smile at him the way I’d smile at anyone learning something difficult for the first time: with respect, with patience, with the knowledge that he’s not lost—he’s finding his way.
But here’s what I didn’t see then, what I couldn’t see:
The sextant was always moving in the plane. My center was always moving. Every moment, a different relationship with the six directions. Every breath, the six emerging somewhere else.
I kept trying to fix the drift. Get it perfect. Hold it steady.
But the drift wasn’t the problem.
The boom operator couldn’t see what the receiver pilot saw. The receiver pilot couldn’t see what the boom operator saw. That wasn’t failure. That was the design.
When we both held our centers and stayed present to where we each stood, fuel flowed. Not because either of us fixed the other’s position. Because we aligned—each seeing from where we were, sharing what only we could see.
I couldn’t fix anything. Everything was always moving.
All I could do was notice where I stood in relation to what held steady, and see what he couldn’t see from where he was.
That’s not something I learned in a classroom.
That’s something the stars showed me, three degrees at a time, over years of drifting and returning.
Now I understand that is how all of us interact with each other as well, your center moving, my center moving and both of us moving at the same time changes the story I’m experiencing from moment to moment.
I check my position all the time now. Not in the sky, but here—hand on chest, breath steady, feet on ground.
Same sky. Same stars. Same practice.
We’re not lost. We’re exactly here. Center of the one expressing my living relationship with the indescribably mysterious. And so are you, so are we all.
Stand outside tonight.
Breathe into your heart.
Feel what happens. The six directions emerge—front and back, left and right, top and bottom. Each separate and yet inseparable. The front comes with the back. One is two and never alone.
This is what the boom pod taught me at 35,000 feet, what that doorway at Otis’s house showed me in sixth grade, what every stargazing tour confirms: you don’t find your center. You generate it through breath.
Now align the six.
Turn your right shoulder to rising—Hikina, where stars are born each night. Turn your left shoulder to leaving—Komohana, where stars return to darkness.
You are facing what we call north. Standing both with and within ALL.
Not “all is one.” That collapses everything, makes you separate from what you’re seeking, sends you searching for your place among the stars.
Three apples on a table. Not applesauce. Not three isolated objects. ALL three apples, right there. Each distinct. Nothing merged. Everything held.
All is All, everything – ALL
not All and that over there too, that would make this and that
then it wouldn’t be All anymore.
Just ALL. Each star distinct. Each star necessary. You included.
But the sky is not only stars. It is the ALL—the vast dark, the clouds, the storms, the empty stretches where no light seems to fall. The mystery includes the contraction, the resentment, the failure, the ache. These are not detours from the path; they are the very darkness that makes stars visible. A life without contrast would be a noon sky: functional, but starless.
Look up at the stars—humanity’s first cathedral, the physical manifestation of the origin of creation. Learn the pattern that never changes yet changes from breath to breath.
The stars hold their positions relative to each other. But they rise and set from where you stand. Constancy and change aren’t contradictory. They’re what happens when you establish HERE and watch what moves around you.
This is what Mintaka showed me. What the aurora taught that night over Alaska. What my mother understood her whole life, reading clouds and finding stories that dissolved as soon as they appeared.
Match that pattern to the ground. Discover the seasons of destiny.
Four in the modern world—winter, spring, summer, fall. But in ancient Japan, seventy-two seasons as they knew themselves more deeply. First frost. Peach blossoms begin. Wild geese return. The more distinctions you notice, the more deeply you know yourself and where you stand.
Molli taught me this walking around that pond in Joshua Tree. TheTurkey Vultures return . Week the Pleiades rose. Bull frog croaking season. She was building a map in rhythm, the way the Japanese did centuries before.
This December in the USA, we see Orion rising in the east, the hunter striding across winter skies. Children know that Santa rides a snow sled through frozen air, pulled by reindeer over white landscapes. That’s the northern experience—true, real, lived.
But this same December in Australia, that same constellation of Orion hangs upside down, his sword pointing north instead of south, called the canoe. And Santa? He’s on a surfboard, riding waves under summer sun. Some Australian children may have never seen snow— Christmas means beach barbecues and mangoes and swimming pools, white wine in the sun. That’s the southern experience—equally true, equally real, equally lived.
Same sky. Same stars. Same breath. Different experience. Both true.
This is what “standing shoulder to shoulder” actually means. Not that we all collapse into one perspective and call it universal. Not that we fragment into isolated experiences and call each one relative. But that your angle and my angle are both necessary. You see what I cannot. I see what you cannot. Together, we see more of the whole what we can not see alone.
Remove either perspective and the understanding becomes incomplete. The northern child who insists Santa can only ride a sled is missing half the truth. The southern child who insists Santa only surfs is missing the other half. But the child who knows both exist—even though they’ve only experienced one—that child understands something deeper: the mystery is big enough to hold both truths at once.
That’s ALL. Not one Santa. Not two separate Santas. But the reality that holds both, and neither.
The never-ending circle. The hula hoop of destiny.
You don’t control it. You harmonize with it. Like the moon rotating around the earth and the earth rotating around the sun, causing the seasons of change. Like the horse that already knew where he was going. Like the boom operator learning to stop fighting the drift and simply hold center while everything else moved.
This is what the Camino taught: wake up, walk, wake up, walk. The path was already there. The villages were already set. The marks carved by those who came before—here is water, here is rest—were already waiting. Your job wasn’t to create the route. Your job was to harmonize with it.
Now look up. Look around.
You are standing shoulder to shoulder with God. Allah. Alaha. Elohim.
Not above you. Not merged with you. Standing beside you, holding your hand, seeing what you don’t see, knowing what you are missing.
This is what my father showed me that day on the baseball field. He didn’t fix what happened. He couldn’t. But he stood where I couldn’t stand and saw what I couldn’t see. He changed the relationship. Made room for me to breathe.
That’s what the mystery does. Stands with you. Sees the whole field while you see your section of it. Together surviving and thriving with and within each other.
The seven wolves traveling the ecliptic know this. Each following its own path. Each distinct. None leaving the pack. Not because they merge into one wolf, but because they hold their positions while moving together.
The three stars in Orion’s Belt know this. Alnitak rises first, marks the path. Alnilam follows, reads the marks, adds its own. Mintaka rises last with the benefit of everything that came before. Each star separate. All moving together. The caravan never alone.
Mitakuye Oyasin—ALL my relations. Not only “I am related to all things,” but “ALL relations radiate from HERE.” This is what the Lakota knew. What every wisdom tradition recognizes when it stops pretending we’re all the same.
Remove any star and the whole configuration changes. Not because that star is special, but because every point is necessary. Remove your breath from this moment and this moment doesn’t exist.
You’re not optional. Your existence isn’t an accident to justify. The pattern needs you here.
When you do this practice, you’re not alone. Every person who has ever stood under these stars and breathed into their heart—they’re standing with you across time. And everyone doing it right now, on every continent, speaking every language—they’re standing with you across space. Eight billion possible centers. Eight billion unique views. All held within ALL.
And here’s what happens when we all do this: the collective light that emerges won’t be uniform. It will be like different stars burning with different colors, different intensities, and different storms rolling through the same sky. Because your unique expression of awareness creates different beauty than mine. We’re not all solving for the same answer—we’re each a unique question the mystery is asking itself.
Heaven isn’t elsewhere. It’s what emerges when each person finds their own center. Not merging into oneness—that would erase the particular angle only you can see from. Not seperating into isolation—that would lose the field where wonder arises. But 8 billion distinct centers, each holding their own seven directions steady, in awe, recognition, heaven itself—arises naturally between us.
Look up at humanity’s first cathedral. Match the pattern to your ground. Accept the seasons as they come. Harmonize with the hula hoop already spinning. Recognize who’s standing with you.
So I stand here tonight in the Joshua Tree desert. Looking up at humanity’s first cathedral.
I breathe into my heart. The six directions emerge.
I turn my right shoulder to rising, my left to leaving. I face north.
Accept the seasons as they come. Harmonize with the hula hoop already spinning. Recognize who’s standing with you.
I see God’s hand holding mine. I’m surrounded. Standing with and within. Shoulder to shoulder.
God sees what I don’t see. Grace, God’s hug.
Heaven emerging from my heart.
I see the Anishinaabe moose standing in Alaska, teaching me I can’t control mystery nor do I know what mystery is doing. The horse already knowing where we’re going. The aurora dancing across the boom pod window. My father stumbling with his Soda. Molli reading the microseasons. The three stars of Orion’s caravan. Seven wolves traveling together. My mother’s last clouds dissolving into sky.
All of it held. All of it here. Nothing lost.
This isn’t stargazing.
This is practicing heaven.
People of Earth – Come one, come all. Bring yourselves exactly as you are. Before there were borders, there was earth. Before there were divisions, there was belonging. And what belongs to all cannot be owned by any. The night sky has always been our common inheritance— older than every nation, richer than every fortune, freely offered to anyone who looks up. Tonight, and in these pages, we set down what the world told us we were: the labels, the ranks, the boxes too small for souls. We remember the part of ourselves that existed before all that— the part that recognizes wonder without permission. Like the fierce honey badger, we move past the hierarchies humans invented. Gravity pulls on all of us the same, and the stars shine on all of us alike. Here, under this vast cosmos, we return to what we truly are when nothing is left but breath, body, and sky. Tonight we are people of earth. And the universe is our oldest home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book honors Indigenous wisdom that has been teaching the sky for millennia—longer than any written tradition I know.
The Hawaiian directional teachings—Hikina, Komohana, ʻĀkau, and Hema—came to me through published sources on Polynesian wayfinding. These words encode an entire cosmology into the language of navigation itself, reminding us that every direction is both physical and sacred.
The Anishinaabe turtle shell calendar and the wolf trail teaching reached me through educational materials rooted in Ojibwe traditions. The Nyoongar story of the Emu in the Sky, as shared by Elder Noel Nannup in educational documentaries, showed me how to read darkness itself as pattern.
These are not my traditions. I am a guest learning from publicly shared knowledge, and I have done my best to honor these teachings with accuracy and respect. Any errors in understanding or representation are mine alone.
I am grateful to Carl Jung and Wayne Dyer, whose insights into the morning and afternoon of life helped me understand what the rising and leaving sky had been teaching all along: that transformation is not failure, and setting is not ending.
PRONUNCIATION GUIDE FOR SACRED WORDS AND TERMS
This book honors words from many languages and living traditions. These sacred words carry deep cultural and spiritual significance—sounds, tones, and meanings that English cannot fully capture. When encountering them, approach with respect, recognizing they belong to traditions that have stewarded them across millennia.
These are approximations and the sounds carry meaning English phonetics and definations can’t fully capture.
Hawaiian Directional and Spiritual Terms
Hikina (hee-KEE-nah) – “To rise”; directional meaning: east, representing beginnings
Komohana (koh-moh-HAH-nah) – “To set” or “to descend”; directional meaning: west, representing completion and return
ʻĀkau (ah-KOO-ah or AH-kow) – North; associated with the sacred, deity, spiritual guidance
Hema (HEH-mah) – South; associated with warmth, growth, earthly connection
Luna (LOO-nah) – “Above” or “up”
Lalo (LAH-loh) – “Below” or “down”
Puʻuwai (poo-OO-vye) – Heart; the seventh direction, the center where all others meet
Pono (POH-noh) – Righteousness, balance, harmony; living in right relationship
The Ancient Babylonian Root and Its Descendants
Ilu (EE-loo) – Ancient Babylonian word for god or deity; the root that traveled through millennia
Elohim (el-oh-HEEM) – Hebrew word for God (plural form used as singular)
Alaha (ah-LAH-hah) – Aramaic word for God, descended from Babylonian ilu
Allah (ah-LAH or AL-lah) – Arabic word for God, literally “the God”
Germanic Root
Gutom (GOO-tom) – Proto-Germanic root meaning “that which is called upon”
Indigenous North American
Mitakuye Oyasin (mee-TAH-koo-yay oh-YAH-seen) – Lakota: “All my relations” or “we are all related”
Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka (wah-KAHN TAHN-kah) – Lakota: “Great Mystery” or “Great Spirit”
Australian Aboriginal
Jukurrpa (joo-KOOR-pah) – “The Dreaming”; the oldest continuous tradition of naming mystery (65,000+ years)
African Yoruba
Olódùmarè (oh-loh-DOO-mah-reh) – Supreme deity, “Owner of endless space”
Sanskrit
Om (OHM) – Sacred sound and spiritual symbol; primordial or the first sound mantra
Other Terms
In situ (in SEE-too) – Latin: “in its original position or place”
Nacha So Nacha Anno (NAH-chah so NAH-chah AH-no) – Pali: “not the same, and yet not another”
Mintaka (min-TAH-kah) – Arabic star name; westernmost star in Orion’s Belt, sits on the celestial equator
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony spent years staring at the sky from 50,000 feet as an Air Force Inflight Aerial Refueling specialist, learning to hold center while everything around him moved. After the military, he became a stargazing tour guide in Joshua Tree National Park, where he’s spent over 500 nights watching people from every faith and no faith look up at the same stars and remember something they’d forgotten.
This book emerged from a guest’s question he couldn’t answer, months of etymology research between tours, and the slow recognition that every culture that ever looked up was reaching toward the same mystery with different sounds.
He lives in an RV named Rexi with his wife Molli and dog Bondi, traveling between dark skies and still tilting his head back every clear night to practice what the stars keep teaching.
You can find more about his work at addicted2wonder.com
Here’s the back cover copy we developed for this final manuscript:
For over 500 nights, Tony has guided stargazers through the Joshua Tree desert, lifting a green laser toward the stars and asking one simple question: Do you see?
Most people come expecting astronomy. What they get is something else entirely.
After a guest asked a question he couldn’t answer—”Do the native people believe in a God?”—Tony began tracing the etymology of sacred words across cultures. What he discovered changed everything: the word “God” didn’t exist 1,500 years ago. Allah and Elohim share ancient Babylonian roots. Every culture that ever looked up shaped different sounds to hold the same mystery.
But the real discovery came later, standing under Orion on an ordinary night in the desert, when he finally understood: he wasn’t searching for his place in the pattern. He was the place where the pattern became conscious of itself.
Under the Same Stars weaves together etymology, stargazing, and memoir into a field guide for finding your center in an uncertain world. From boom pods over Alaska to the Camino de Santiago, from his father’s grace on a baseball field to his mother’s last sunset, Tony maps five principles that emerged from 500 nights under the desert sky:
Know yourself well enough to act without hesitation.
Surrender what you cannot control, and navigate what you can.
Walk through acceptance—meet the moment as it is, then offer more.
Lift your eyes—see from a perspective others cannot see.
Stand shoulder to shoulder with those who need someone to change the story.
This isn’t a book about becoming something you’re not. It’s an invitation to recognize what you’ve always been: the origin point from which all relations arise, standing at the center of your own cosmos, exactly where the mystery needs you to be.
Look up. This is practicing heaven.
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.