We live in what some call a dark sky community — though anyone who’s watched the lights creep closer over the years knows we’re still fighting for that darkness. Still, on a good night in Estes Park, the Milky Way stretches overhead like something you forgot was always there. People drive hours for what we can simply step outside and find.
I still stop for the sky. Every time.
Especially when the moon is full.
After the death of my child, Bee, I developed a ritual I didn’t plan and couldn’t explain. Every full moon, I go out and look up. Something in that practice — the constancy of it, the way the moon keeps showing up regardless of what I’m carrying — has become one of the ways I stay connected to Bee. To what I can only call their deathless life. The moon doesn’t ask me to explain it. It just comes.
I think of how many of us are struggling right now. The state of our world — the fear, the grief, the sense that something we counted on is crumbling. The exhaustion of trying to hold it all together when the ground keeps shifting. My heart breaks for those who are dying, grieving, terrified. And I want to say, as clearly as I can: You are not alone in this. What feels like falling apart may be, in the oldest wisdom traditions, exactly how transformation begins.
The heroine’s journey — and I believe we are all on it right now, whether we chose it or not — doesn’t begin with triumph. It begins with the threshold. With the moment the old way stops working, and something new hasn’t yet arrived. That in-between place is not a mistake. It is, the mystics insist, where the deepest waking happens.
The mystics would not have found this strange. They have always paid attention to the rhythms and patterns of the cosmos — not as superstition, not as prediction, but as a form of listening. Hildegard of Bingen heard the cosmos singing through mandalas and herbs. The Indigenous navigators of the Pacific crossed vast oceans by the stars, moving in sync with something larger than themselves. Brother Sun, Sister Moon — St. Francis named them as kin, not backdrop.
I’ve been a contemplative guide and teacher for nearly 30 years, as an ordained priest and a student of the mystics. I came to astrology late, and skeptically, honestly. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized: I had been living my chart my whole life. I just hadn’t known how to read the map.
What cracked me open was grief.
After Bee’s death, I found myself on a vision quest in New Mexico. It was one night alone under the desert sky. The Perseid meteor shower came that night, streaking across the darkness, one after another, not stopping. Something shifted in me, which I still can’t fully explain. The sense that I was part of something vast, patient, and present. That the cosmos was not indifferent to my grief. That Bee — closer than my very breath — was somehow woven into all of it.
The skies were speaking. They had always been speaking. I just hadn’t been still enough — or broken open enough — to hear.
I’ve written more about astrology and what it is and isn’t over on my Substack, Broken Open, for those who want to go deeper into the why. What I want to say here is simpler: This is not about horoscopes. It’s about learning to pay attention to the patterns already at work in your life, to the gifts and shadows encoded in who you are, and to the larger rhythms you are part of, whether you know it or not.
The mystic path, in every tradition, asks us to wake up to the oneness we are already living in. The cosmos is one of the oldest and most beautiful ways human beings have done that waking.
This spring, I’m offering several doorways into this kind of awakening, right here in Estes Park and online.
“The Soul’s Compass: The Power of Mystics, Artists & the Cosmos” begins March 9 for four Monday evenings, 5:30 to 7 p.m., hosted at the Rocky Mountain Meditation Group. We’ll use the astrological landscape as one lens among many — alongside the wisdom of mystics, artists, and contemplative practice — to see ourselves and this moment more clearly. You don’t need to know astrology. You need to bring only your curiosity. Early bird pricing is available through March 3. In-person spots are limited.
“Inner Alchemy of Wisdom” begins March 26 for nine Thursday mornings, as well as a spring retreat in Estes Park, May 28 to 31. This is the deeper river of the mystic path: embodied practice, wisdom traditions, your own story as the primary text. Just a few spots remain, and enrollment closes March 15.
Finally, on March 8, I host “Second Sunday: Becoming Love,” a free, hybrid, monthly gathering open to anyone. No experience is required. Just come.
The moon keeps showing up. Every month, without fail, it finds me — out on the deck, or stopped on a trail, or standing at the window in the middle of the night.
And every time, I feel Bee.
And I feel hope for our hurting world.
The cosmos is not indifferent to what we are carrying or experiencing. The skies have always been speaking — to our grief, our longing, our becoming.
You are welcome here — just as you are.
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