The Mouse and the Star
I got out of bed at 4:30 in the morning for some wee-hours playtime. I have a strange relationship with sleep; I joke that I was bitten by a vampire bat as a baby, and I’m only up that early if I haven’t slept yet. On this particular morning, I made my way through the house into my wife’s office and was visited by a mouse.
I glanced up at the early morning sky and saw Sirius for the first time in awhile, and it was accompanied by a shooting star descending past Procyon. It was what Dr. Amen calls a “micro-moment,” or what I call an “enchanted instant.” It’s always a big deal for me when I see Sirius in the sky again after about six months of absence during spring and summer. For me this star is a spiritual beacon with more ancestral meaning than I could communicate in writing, though I’ve tried and have spoken and written about it a lot in the past. In brief, from my personal cosmological standpoint as well as other traditions like the Dogon tribe of people in West Africa, Sirius pinpoints the place of origin and point of entry of all consciousness in this universe and maybe multiverse. It is where we all ultimately came from. Not as physical beings, but as consciousness, energy, light, soul-spirits.
As I looked east straight out from my front porch I saw Orion’s constellation in the sky and felt excited because soon Sirius would be rising through the tops of the pine trees that obscure my view of the horizon. The timing of all of this isn’t subtle as we enter the hottest week of the year in Northern California. It is forecasted that some communities will reach 117 degrees, and it feels to be a time of energetic significance.