Reading the stars

I remember stumbling from bed in the early morning to the kitchen, switching on the light, and seeing a very beautiful mess. Goopy dough dripping over the edge of my red mixing bowl. The dough had risen.

Sounds like an Easter message. And perhaps it was for me anyhow. I had all but given up on the dough, nearly tossed it into the trash but had—as a matter of principle—pushed it to the side to see if more was going on than what I could see. And then I forgot about it. The kids wanted to get out of the house, and now for the life of me I cannot remember where we went or what we did. There’s a great chance we ended up downtown Iowa City at the ped mall, the most dearly-missed-to-parents place during December, January, and February when the Midwest winter pushes us inside and off the playground that lies between Bread Garden Market and the Iowa City Public library. But who knows. I cannot locate us from my memory. We had returned that afternoon, gotten busy with getting to bed, gone to bed, and I was now greeting the new day, hoping to squeeze in some work before my very youngest awoke wanting “she-re-al.”

But this wasn’t just any old walk to the kitchen. This morning it was an act of will. An act of me summoning my will to do some work despite the cortisol-induced anxiety that was gripping me and wondering where the work, the money, and the clients were going to come from. Where in this hell was God, Universe, Source—whoever they are?

But rounding the corner and seeing the dough dripping over the edges–risen–within the container of a mind telling me to believe beyond whatever hope I could see at present saw in that moment tangible hope. That I was going to make it. That the work I had put into my business last week, last summer, last year–it was working on my behalf. More was going on than I realized.

So, the cortisol ebbed.

Is this just silly?

I understand the ridiculousness of the connection. That this cantankerous batch of dough somehow had something meaningful to say about my life—that it was “a sign”—this is not me. But then again I’m not the person I was five years ago, and I’m suddenly aware that that I’m willing to read hope in my rising yeast.  Perhaps I am losing my mind after all. 

The reality, though, is that I want hope. I want to feel something other than anxiety. And in wanting hope, I’m willing to draw connections between my life and whatever it is that I’m engaged with. Skip past the anxiety. Sometimes I belive our thirst for hope is more critical than our need for logic. We want some hope, for sure, but our soul needs hope like our bodies need oxygen. Withdraw hope from a human and you suck out the life much like the dementors that Harry Potter learns to repel with a patronus charm. When life gets rough, we reach for hope and then prop up that hope with what we’re seeing around us. We learn that hope is our own patronus charm.

I’m positive the me of five years ago would have sloughed off this sign for something more grounded (read “logical”). His arrogance would have poo-pooed the notion that dough could say anything meaningful about my life. But that me also didn’t listen to his intuition. He cut it down, cut it off, shut it up. Didn’t pay much attention to it in part because he was told not to pay attention to it, and that me new how to take orders and play by the rules. Never mind that he was one of the four personality schemas the MBTI identifies as “intuitive.” 

This inner dialectic makes me think of those first star mappers. What motivated them? What pushed, prompted, and invited them to see stars as “signs,” celestial signposts that could help them locate themselves? Were they desperate for hope like I’ve been, and saw significance, drawing out meaning or did they discover the correlation of galactic movement and terrestrial wanderings? Were they emotionally invested in the star-gazing—biased—or as scientifically aloof as I am when checking the expiration date on the milk? How did stars become signs?

I realize that the question I’m asking is much more accurately asked when asked blandly: how did humans learn to navigate the natural world? I suspect that I’m not going to find much more than musings and scholarly speculations even if I were going to go searching for the answers—which I’m not—to how we learned to navigate unknown places. The realization doesn’t stop me from wondering how I’m going to navigate my own terra incognita. It only allows me to judge myself as lazy now for admitting researching an answer is not my priority. My cinnamon rolls are.

Am I desperate?

That’s a great question. The truth is that I am desperate for a lot of things. I’m desperate enough to find hope in rising dough, which is what dough does. But I’m also desperate for a cause. I’m desperate for love. I’m desperate to provide for my children. AI believe I’m where Kevin Kling says I need to be in midlife: paying attention to my senses. Following them. Getting out of my brain. Getting into my body. Getting to know your intuition because it’s one of the few things you actually have as a human being.

How do you learn to follow something that you’ve relegated to the back of the line your entire life? How? When do you call him off the bench ? When do you call him out of the stands to play? 

Disregarding my intuition as a way of navigating new spaces was a form of self-harm. You don’t need to qualify as an N on the MBTI to get the privilege of listening to your intuition. And people who tell you that you have no intuition and no discernment about anything—people, people’s character, etc—need not be pursued. They’re poison. 

I do believe that the question I’m attempting is this: how do I navigate spaces I’ve never encountered before? Ancient explorers sailed around the globe, mapping their way because people before them had mapped the night sky, the Universe, and had created a GPS available to all everynight in high resolution imagery. 

In learning to the map the sky above them they were better suited for mapping the land beneath their feet. It’s brilliant, and we have to stop long enough to appreciate the fact that the map in the night sky is available from every part of the globe—which is not to say that navigation is easy. You have to know what you’re looking at. But for the moment I want to draw attention to the awesomeness that ancient people knew how to locate themselves on a planet light years from the celestial bodies. “Know their places, movements, and seasons, they would say, “and you can autolocate–wherever you are.”

So, how do you map the stars in the soul’s sky? It’s a question I’ve been asking longer than I’ve been aware of it. And I’m now asking it again while sitting beside a bonfire, staring at a brilliant night sky above Iowa City, which is essentially the same sky pitched over Chicago, Minnesota, Calgary, and LA. For me gazing skyward from the Midwest, the Big Dipper is in the northwest quadrant. The shrieks of kids roasting marshmallows ended a half-hour ago, and I’m holding down the fort, staring at the stars and wondering about my own soul’s stars. 

I tend the fire, compiling the embers that have burned themselves free of each other, and breathe new life into the flames. Eden comes to check on me. She’s 3. She shines a flashlight she’s been playing with all evening into my eyes and wants to know if I’m okay. “I’m fine,” I say. “Wanna sit with me?” She doesn’t. She wants to watch her “moobie,” which is either Dora, Barbie, or Gabby. 

He little voice and bold refusal to sit with me helps me think of my own points of light during this season of life in the lands I’m exploring. Rebecca Solnit, Richard Rohr, Dante, Plato. These thinkers offer complex imaginative texts that speak of their own experience in such a way that let me see myself in them, like Elektra fitting her footprint in Orestes’ and recognizing that her brother had returned to Mycenae. I see in their starry maps the constellations of my sky. They let me know that I’m not the first to experience the lostness of a midlife that careened off a seemingly predictable trajectory. I see them immortalized upon the the apotheosis of the published page and suddenly have my coordinates. They’ve charted themselves in relation to their stars, poetic dances of light and shadow that now no longer feel so uncertain and stressful.

Courage sometimes manifests as curiosity leaving the dough on the counter for the night. “There may be more going on than I can see.” Give room for a surprise and leave it unfinished, which is a “prayer for tomorrow” as Ross Gay would say. This is one way to learn to read the stars.