In 1977, just after my first birthday,
an astronomer discovered what would become the first of a collection of space objects
          called centaurs.
And because astronomy loves mythology as much as I do,
this icy hybrid asteroid-comet became known as Chiron:
          the tragic centaur teacher of the ancient Greeks,
           a symbol of our core wounds
           those we work a lifetime to heal.

Astrologers – astronomy’s hippie cousins –
posited that the phenomenon often dubbed “midlife crisis”
could be an effect of Chiron’s 49-51 year trip around the signs of the zodiac.
The majority of us will experience only one return of Chiron to our natal sign:
a transformational, revelatory period
when things come together or fall apart (or both)
when we begin to heal our oldest wounds and transmute them into lessons
when our past and our future collide, and divide.

My Chiron return begins today, at age 49 years and 266 days,
at the comet’s tail end of the most spectacularly explosive episode
of my life.
All color and stardust
still reeling from the impact
I can see a little me
barefoot in her driveway
looking up at the stars
and I know they are the same stars
but also
that they couldn’t look more different to me now.
As a child I gazed up with all wonder and inexplicable possibility
Now
I know what’s out there
and, charting my path,
          I’m returning to her dreams
          and etching them into the night sky.

6/19/26