Did you know the North Star changes? 

I did not know this until a year ago this past December when my friend DeAnna presented me with an extraordinary gift: an artisanal chocolate Advent calendar celebrating constellations of the night sky. What made this gift extraordinary extended well beyond the conscientiously sourced and exquisitely crafted confections. It was the way DeAnna chose to honor a beloved friend who had died over the summer and in whose memory the calendar had been in part dedicated. The large round box arrived in her mail as a gift from her friend’s husband who had sent the Advent calendar in honor of their friendship. However, because DeAnna’s own health journey had involved a firm and conscious renunciation of sugar, she knew she would not be able to partake of the chocolates. In order to honor both her friend’s memory and her hard-earned commitment to her own health, she decided to entrust the chocolates to someone whom she felt would appreciate them at every level they had been created and given. I was honored DeAnna asked me to be a guardian of that gift. She entrusted this treasure box of chocolates into my care with the understanding I would return the box itself (a work of keepsake art in its own right) at the end. The practice of lighting a candle and deeply savoring one chocolate a night in anticipation of Christmas became a solemn and restrained ritual of pleasure, delight, and the claiming of Life’s sweetness as a daily commitment during the darkest time of the year.

Did you know the North Star changes? 

On the second night of the Advent calendar, a tribute to the constellation of Draco, the Dragon, was matched with a delicately intense Dark and Stormy Truffle decorated to look itself like a telescoped closeup of the the galaxy. And from a brief entry about Draco in the accompanying booklet, I learned how 5,000 years ago a star in this constellation, Thuban, had been the North Star. And the Egyptians who built the Pyramids at Giza in alignment with the north spin axis of that time were looking to Thuban, not Polaris.

I felt the world shift a little beneath my feet as I absorbed this fact: The North Star changes. The imagined still point that runs like a plumb line through either side of the North and South poles is not itself fixed. In fact, the world wobbles a bit so over time the angle of the earth’s tilt changes. The astronomically glacial speed at which this happens cannot be marked by our lived experience of time. So it can feel like a fact of our existence that the North Star has been and will continue to be Polaris. But before Polaris there was Draco. And in a thousand years or so the North Star will be another star all together: Gamma Cephei. The North Star is not a single fixed reality that we can look to forever without change. It describes a relational aspect of Earth’s position to and orbit around the sun.

Did you know the North Star changes? 

The phrase “finding your North Star” is a beautiful concept that can encourage a sense of inner knowing as its own compass. From this place, we learn to trust the wisdom of our own bodies, truths we know in our bones even when we cannot yet find the words. It can be an empowering metaphor describing our efforts to let our hearts be our guide, especially when we must go in a direction away from the gravitational pull of conventional wisdom or the conditioning of our religious and familial histories. And yet, if the North Star changes in the physical world, then is it possible it can change in our inner worlds, too? That even our deepest knowing of who we are may itself be a changeable truth and the longest-held beliefs about ourselves might not be fixed in space and time. Perhaps the most imperceptible shifts are already happening, causing slow but profound re-alignments in how we are positioned in this Universe.

When I adjusted the metaphor of “finding my North Star” to include its changeability, I was able to almost immediately extend a little more forgiveness to myself. Because all the versions of myself that have carried me to this moment were each doing the best they knew how to navigate with the map available to them at that time. Each one was doing what it thought was right, with a compass pointed to a North Star of belief about the world and who I needed to be in it. This isn’t to absolve me of responsibility for mistakes or harm I have caused in the past. But if you had asked any one of those past versions of me whether I was trying to find “my North Star” they would have all nodded emphatically as though this inner directional truth was a fixed destination that could be known forever. None of them understood there is no fixed point we arrive at in this constantly moving Universe. Like the North Star is an expression of our changing relationship to the sky, I have never been a fixed object and no one else has been either.

Did you know the North Star changes?

I once met a person who introduced themselves to me by asking: “Which star in the universe are you?” To me, it was a brilliant question and reminder we are each our own brilliant star in the cosmos and so is the person next to us. But in the moment, I didn’t have a good answer for them. Last year, I sat for a month with an extraordinary box of chocolates entrusted to me by a dear friend honoring both her grief and her love. She showed me something about what it means to be able to care for an entire constellation of relationships when one is true to her own changing self and how one gift can radiate in all directions. In the year since, I have found myself in a dizzying spin-cycle of change that is touching into every part of who I thought I once was, including leaving my vocation of 16 years, making life-changing commitments in my relationships, and pushing past fears and limits I once believed were core to my personality and character. Because it can take me time to find words, especially when I am living the realities I am trying to describe, it feels enough to say in this moment how I can feel my North Star is, once again, changing. Though it’s taken almost an entire year and the arrival and passing of another Advent to find my answer, I now have one to the question about which star I am in the universe. If I were asked the same question today, I would like to be able to say: “I am trying to be my own North Star. And did you know the North Star changes?