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| Jupiter (Institute of Technical Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR) |
November 4, 2012, midnight hour,
Isleta Marina. Pleasantly
exhausted after a day sail, I went to sleep early, around 9:00 p.m., in
Andariego’s forward cabin. Sometime around midnight, the light of a star
peeking through the V-berth hatch woke me up. I checked the Distant Suns and Star Walk apps in my iPhone. It was Jupiter. Overcast skies, only a
few selected stars peeked through the veil of clouds at a time. The hatch is
small so my selection was even more delimited—but rich.
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| Cancer Constellation (Wiki-The Stars in Cancer) |
The first constellation I identified
was Cancer, the Crab. The moon (waning gibbous, 66.7%) was astronomically in
the Cancer Constellation. With intuitive imagination, I was able to see its
pincers and form. This fascinated me, to the point of awe, because before going
to sleep I had been reading a book (The
Quest for the Zodiac: The Cosmic Code Beyond Astrology (1999) by John Lash)
about the difference between the astronomy or sidereal ecliptic and the
tropical astrology ecliptic, the stuff of popular horoscopes in newspapers.
They don’t match.
Technically, you have to move one
constellation back to get the actual constellation in the sky (not the
horoscope sign) where the sun was on your birth date. Astronomically, mine
would have been Cancer, a water element, rather than Leo, a fire element in the
popular horoscope. Coincidence?
After cloud curtain calls in the
hatch theater stage, I recognized Gemini, the Twins. Outside the ecliptic, I
identified the little dog, Canis Minor. Then there was Orion, the Hunter, with
his three shiny stars for a belt. As I dozed off, after Jupiter’s wake-up call
in the midnight hours, I saw Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus, the
bull’s eye. Sixty-eight light years away, Aldebaran, the red star, is a
reminder of my life’s passage, and that looking at stars is to look into our
past, individual and evolutionary. As one looks into the deepest depth of the
universe (the self) even through the hatch of a small sailboat on a cloudy
night, the book’s question invokes mental shivers: “How is humanity living through
me?” (Lash 99).
The ‘writing-in-the-sky’ was not
clear to me but at some deeper level, seeing the moon in Cancer after reading
about it made me understand something I cannot express with words—a most
difficult confession for a PhD linguist. In semiotic terms (a branch of
linguistics that studies the meaning of signs), this is something that I want
to pursue in my sailing adventures. Perhaps I can call it, astro-semiotics.
I’ll finish this entry with a quote from
Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher: “A wanderer exiled from the great
origins, in former times I was already a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, a
mute fish in the sea.” (Lash 89). I am a wanderer rediscovering the language of
the stars.
