Monday brings the last New Moon of the Summer, and I’m observing it by celebrating my ninth year hosting “The Storyteller’s Night Sky” on Interlochen Public Radio.
It all began back in 2012, one year after we achieved designation for the Headlands as the 9th International Dark Sky Park in the world. Venus had made its rare transit of the Sun that year, which signaled the fulfillment of the Mayan calendar, and by the time of my first segment, it was late August. There was a Blue Moon.
Back then, the program was an interview format, five minutes long. Each week I was patched into the recording equipment at Interlochen from a remote studio in the basement of the Crooked Tree Arts Center in Petoskey.
Over the years, the reporters, the format, and the recording process has changed, until eventually arriving at its current 1 minute, 50 second format, which sometimes takes hours to create!
For nine years I have spent some part of every week rolling out my maps and papers to take that great adventure into the sky, seeking its mystery and its story. This work has deepened everything I know, whether I learned it through academic study or lived experience. As Emily Dickinson noted, the stars are asterisks that point a human life.
In fact, Emily Dickinson figured in one of the many highlights of hosting this program, when my quoting her for the segment on International Dark Sky Week in 2015 was broadcast worldwide when it was featured on Google News.
When the Moon meets Venus on Thursday this week, I’ll be contemplating the quote from Rudolf Steiner that inspires all of my work in bringing the stories together with the stars: The more abundantly the harmony of the cosmos fills the soul, the more peace and harmony there will be on the earth.
