Thoughts on Nature
Sailing, stars, and sense of Place
Sitting silently at the bow of the vessel I call home, I gaze up into the heavens, towards a billion billion plasma spheres that serve as guides through the vastness and connection to not only my place in the middle of the sea, but as a connection to the past and future generations that have and will look up towards the mystery that unfolds above. The stars swirl and dance above my head whilst the dark sea below reflects the most ancient memory board of all. Shining. In a moment of only described as magic, I’m back standing on my roof, the vision of being alone on deck at night brought on solely by the path I traced from nav star to nav star.
It has been five years since those fateful nights with Sea Education Association/SEA Semester, where I learned how to find my place with the stars above and to tell the stories of gods and men, immortalized through mythological meaning that once allowed people to remember the sky, to remember their histories, to recall their Place, a knowledge that might save their lives, and help guide me home. Five years, yet each time I arc to Arcturus and speed on to Spic I can feel the ground beneath my feet swell with the sea and my entire universe shrink down to 134 feet of creaking boards and taut lines. The stars we spent every evening and morning shooting with sextants have become a mnemonic device to the events and memories of sailing through the Caribbean, just as the stars, planets and dark spaces allowed some indigenous cultures to recall invaluable practical knowledge such as seasonal variations, navigation, timekeeping and much of the ethical framework for their culture.
A few years later, sitting out under the stars in the backyard of my home in Monterey, California, the stars looked different than those I had first learned whilst at sea. Spinning through the darkness above, even the north star shone from a different altitude. Of course, this is how celestial navigation works anywhere in the world, given distances at given times of the year allow one to pinpoint their spot on Earth. More than that, my knowledge of the celestial bodies provided me with a sense of place, a sense of being, a sense of purpose. I had not considered the value of building an intimacy with Place before hearing my professor Michael McGinnis speak of concepts of bioregionalism, traditional ecological knowledge, and the ecology of Place. But here I was, finding my Place through the stars above as Navajo, Inuits, and Polynesians did thousands of years before.
The navigators of Polynesia passed down their navigational lore through storytelling that allowed for the exploration of the Pacific Islands. Just as Moana followed the constellation to find Maui, the islanders could always find their way back by following the shapes and connections made in the vastness. The familiarity they had with the stars above gave them a sense of place, not just in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but their place in the larger galactic stage, a skill future generations may rely on as we expand our home to include other moons, planets, and solar systems. In BattleStar Galactica, humans relied on an ancient story of the stars, a map of the celestial bodies in a given point in the universe, to guide them back to the legendary Earth, to no longer be lost in the cosmos, but to be guided back to themselves. Place.
“We can see why our sense of place can be so entangled with our sense of who we are, why to be at no place is akin to being no one.” — Gene Tracy
Laying out in the silence of the night, I gaze upon the same stars from the stories, songs, poems, and music of the Rapa Nui and the Raiatea and I am struck with a sense of place, a sense of belonging, a sense of self that I never felt before. These feelings can be traced through the sky, as I journey between planets and constellations, a story I can tell future generations with little more than the cloak of darkness and the patience to find each body. While at the same time I begin to write my story in the sky, modern astronomers reduce this vision of an Olympus above our heads to a collection of data; helping us to see how vast and incomprehensible the universe actually is whilst relying on technology for its only imagining. Our stories of Place and Self are slowly fading out of existence, fading from the story lines we tell our children, teaching them only the facts and figures of the experienced world around us rather than offering them the lukasa above our heads.
“If humans do someday migrate outward toward the stars, our narrative space will move like an expanding wave before us, a vanguard of the imagination. Our need for stories that help us find our way is too important to be left behind.”
Now is the time for stories drawn in the stars, memory boards crafted from constellations generated from our imagination instead of from the illumination of our phones. For the re-imagination of the sky, the land, the sea. For the re-connection to the natural world, seen and unseen. For the rediscovery of where we are, spatially and temporally. Now is the time for stories of Place, taught from parent to child, interwoven with the mystery of their own lives. I look upon the stars once again, farther from family than I’ve ever been, and I trace a new story amongst unfamiliar stars. I find my Self in finding my Place.
