The Stars

(March 2024. Joshua Tree BLM Lakebed.)

The Stars

When you live in a school bus, you learn to love living with the stars. Perfect stars every clear night quickly become family. Whenever I look up and see the familiar faces of the northern constellations around me, my soul recalibrates its relativity— and I’m home.

I realized recently that I take the stars for granted, and that “Only one in five North Americans can see the Milky Way at night, and 99% of Americans experience light pollution, according to a 2016 study.” This is a profound divorce from the typical human condition for millions of years until quite recently. We evolved with the stars. They’re in our DNA. For millions of years we looked up at them every night as our pattern-seeking brains launched lightning into the world of imagination. We felt drawn into reality beyond touch. We followed the stars to new lands and new adventures. We learned to tell stories about the universe around a campfire, and in so doing passed down the stories of who we were and where we were going. We were made to look at the stars, and in some small but meaningful way the stars were made for us.

I don’t think I could ever live somewhere with light pollution for long. To lose familiarity with the stars is too high a price to pay now that I know what I would be missing. Spinning around I see the sharpness of Sirius, the proud personhood of Orion, the dim redness of the Bull’s Eye, little Pleiades the starcluster (my symbol of chosen family and all loved ones), Perseus the hero stretched between home and the unknown, Cassiopeia the W— W for wonder, wander, why, and wow— my favorite, opening always towards the North Star opposite the Big Dipper’s pointing, the masculine and feminine ways of finding the center circling all year around true north; these symbols are tied to me by invisible lines of meaning; they are integral with me, parts of my own story. I must remember them to remember who I am. 

The story of the tribe was always told in the context of the stars, transmitted by elders at night. A corona of stories surrounded every campfire, and everyone within the sphere of light became a single story, individuals and a superorganism simultaneously— a singular composite unit of evolution now itself adapting as one to the world of darkness around the heat. Can our modern tribes stick together as cohesively absent our natural tethering to the context of the cosmos?

If you’re reading this, I hope you befriend the stars. If you live somewhere bright, plan trips. Go deep into nature and turn all your lights off; it’s wonderful to be silent under the stars with loved ones. Eventually, though, you must go alone. “But if a man be alone, let him look at the stars.” Solitude, like darkness, is an ally of clarity. Intimacy with the stars can reshape one’s mind in inimitable ways, which cannot be conveyed by the voice of another— not even mine.

Stars are the skeleton key of the universe, the map that suggests the way things tend to interconnect. They are loci of relativity, quantum electrons entangled in your observation. They are perspectives, points of wide view from a high place. When a single vision gazes at the bright dazzles of the abyss, they gaze back, triangulating our self-understanding. We learn as children to take the perspectives of other subjects, to imagine self-consciously how others see us; so too can we place ourselves in the shoes of the stars. What the stars see collaboratively are the forms of the universe; when we internalize this, we become better able to see other invisible patterns in our closer environments here on Earth. The clues we gain about the contours of physical reality will often reveal to us similar contours in the world of ideas. I do not trust any philosopher who knows only the walls of the library, but not the spread of the stars.