Shimmering

The only time I ever saw my father cry was when my grandmother died. The light reaching through the crack in the door to his study was bright enough to burn the memory of his quivering shoulders into my mind forever. Sometime after her funeral, when most had paid their respects and left, he took me and my little sister outside to look at the stars. Hayley was too young to fully understand what was happening, but she held my hand just the same, mimicking my father as he pointed out a cluster of stars in the sky.

“That’s Orion’s Belt, girls,” he said. “Our entire family goes to the middle star in the belt once we've moved on from this life. We’re always looking out for each other. Always.”

My father is a university professor of astrophysics; the stars, their energy, and the distance between them has shaped his entire life. As they have for billions of other people spanning throughout thousands of millennia.

You see, the stars have always shaped our future. Every culture or early civilization has a creation story that involves the heavens in some way or another, but beyond the use of dreaming and storytelling, our ancestors were able to study the stars and harness their knowledge for many other things. By mapping out the stars, categorizing them, naming them, and tracking their movements in the sky, they could chart courses across oceans, follow the seasons to suit their agricultural needs, even develop a system to organize time itself. You guessed it, calendars.

These clusters of stars or, constellations, are named after mythical figures complete with a narrative, like Orion the Hunter or Cassiopeia the Banished Queen. Some are named after animals they resemble, such as Pegasus the winged horse or the little bear, Ursa Minor. There are dozens of constellations perched in the sky like silent blue birds of paradise. All of them bright. All of them beautiful. All unique in their own way; zodiac constellations included.

There are 12 star signs, one for each month of the year, giving or taking a few days. Each sign is then grouped into one of the four elements and given an astrological quality, such as, cardinal, mutable, or fixed. The day you were born, and the time, and the place all bear significant meaning to each individual. It’s laid out - like a map, charting your entire existence from the moment you’re born, to the spaces in between, lucky numbers, compatible matches, important dates, and –

It’s bullshit.

I don’t say this just because I’m the daughter of a scientist. I have a hard time believing I am this unique, celestial being who, remind you, is just one of 7.7 billion people in this world, solely because I was born in the morning at the beginning of July almost twenty-nine years ago. There’s got to be more to it than that, right? So why do I, reluctantly and daily, check my horoscope online or listen to the Cancer Today podcast on Spotify?

Like most people, I also have a presence on the internet. I have all the social media accounts to stay connected with my friends and family. I even have a TikTok; I never post anything, but somehow, I’ve managed to get cyber bullied by a Gen Z in the comment section of a laughing baby video more than once. Over the past year, I’ve noticed an increase in the Zodiac presence online. You can pull up your birth chart on almost any astrology site, buy cute clothes decked out with your star sign on most trendy online stores, check your compatibility with friends on Snap Chat, and, apparently, there are dozens of apps that can give you down-to-the-second updates on where the stars and planets are and what they’re doing at any given moment. The Internet has done it time and time again, but now, it’s made your astrological data immediately accessible, popular, progressive, stylish, and yes, profitable.

By having all this data at our disposal, we can pour hours upon hours of our time, energy, and hope into horoscopes. In the end, I believe that we’re not all that interested in astrology itself, but the way it sooths those burning questions that everyone, subconsciously, has. What makes me significant? Why am I like this? What is going to happen to me? All these questions boil into one. Am I going to be okay?

The Milky Way alone has 300 billion stars. So, if you’re ever feeling lost, alone, or insignificant, just type in your birthday and pull up a diagram riddled with confusing numbers and symbols, and mindlessly study your role in the universe.

I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression for most of my life. So long, in fact, I’ve become a master at hiding it, manipulating it, and wrestling with it in my own way. From the research I’ve gathered about Cancers, this seems to be normal for people born under this star sign. We’ve got a tough outer shell like a crab, but we’re tender inside, skittish, overly sensitive, moody, and even vindictive at times.

But, it seems that everyone struggles with these things from time-to-time, on a spectrum. Depression, anxiety, and mental illness aren’t limited to just one star sign. They do not spare souls. The demons you carry with you, craving that pound of flesh, don’t care if you’re an Aries or Pisces or any other in between. These demons can become so heavy and taxing that you will do most anything to relieve yourself of them, even if it’s only for a moment - a chance to catch your breath. I believe that astrology gains its power with intimacy and this is where it works its “magic”. It provides us with scaffolding and blueprints for an exceptionally specific story.

Your story.

With astrology, we’re able to rewrite parts of our lives that feel broken or unfulfilled, we can fill in those blanks with tiny fortunes and affirmations, circle lucky days in our calendars with fat, red markers, and place blame on the stars themselves if things don’t seem to be going the way we intended. Who knows your story better than you do? Even our ancestors, the very same ones who used the stars to make maps and sow fields, knew how important stories were for survival.

A single story can change a person’s entire outlook on life. Stories give us hope. They remind us of where we came from and how far we can go. They can heal us, motivate us, and inspire us. The ability to tell and write stories helps us escape, if only for a moment, from having to carry those demons – to carry the weight of the world. And astrology does a wonderful job writing such a beautiful narrative.

The sky is its canvas. Our lives, willingly given, its ink. A story punctuated with stars.

Though the charts and words seem glamorous and romantic, they can be superficial and dishonest. And the ugly truth is that there is a lot to fear in this world and most of it is beyond our control. You can't wish your problems away on a star and daily horoscope is not a band-aid, but I wish it could be. I wish astrology were real. I wish it were a perfected science handed down to us over hundreds of generations. I want to trust the universe and be able to blame all my problems on Mercury being in retrograde. But, ultimately, I am only one star in 300 billion.

But I’m still here. Shimmering.

I do not deny that life can be cruel and tiresome, but I’ve also seen beautiful and miraculous things; things you can’t map out or find on a chart. It gave me a sunrise with my best friend in South Dakota where I saw her faith collect on her eyelashes like pollen on a bee’s leg. When, really, we were just feeling too much. It gave me a dance with my little sister and a hundred butterflies in our back yard in once we released the fully grown caterpillars into the air. It gave me the top step of my basement staircase where I would read alone for hours, heat collecting from the woodstove sitting on top of the stones my father brought in from outside. It gave me love, love, and more love; so much of it that I, freely, give it to others in my life.

Shakespeare said that, “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” So instead of spending so much of your time reading about your life, charting it, and fearing it, go live it. Let yourself burn so brightly that others ignite in your presence. This will become heaven on Earth. Billions of people lit up like stars. Dimming for no one, simply shimmering.