Denebola & Zavijava
March 7 – March 20, 2026 167.144° – 180° The StarsThis slice of sky holds two stars that are nearly neighbors in space, both sitting about 36 light years from Earth, close enough to be visible to the naked eye on any clear night. What is extraordinary is how different they are from each other, not in distance, but in where they are in their lives.
Denebola is young. Estimated at somewhere between 100 and 400 million years old, it is burning white-blue at 8,500 Kelvin, 15 times brighter than our Sun, spinning so fast, at 128 kilometers per second at its equator, that it has flattened itself into an oblate shape, wider at the middle than at its poles. It is not yet settled. It is still forming around itself a circumstellar debris disk of cool dust at 39 astronomical units, the same kind of protoplanetary disk our own solar system is believed to have emerged from. Denebola may be in the process of building worlds. It doesn’t know yet what it will become.
Zavijava is old. Nearly 3 billion years. An F-type star, yellow-white, much more like our Sun in temperature and output, radiating 3.5 times solar luminosity from a surface of 6,150 Kelvin. It rotates slowly, just over 3 kilometers per second, a 9-day period. It is metal-rich, its iron content 30% higher than the Sun’s, carrying in its atmosphere the accumulated weight of everything it has processed over billions of years. And it sits just 0.69 degrees north of the ecliptic, so close to Earth’s orbital plane that the Moon can pass in front of it. It is nearing the end of its main sequence life.
Same region of space. Same distance from Earth. One just beginning, spinning wildly, building something. One almost finished, slow and heavy with accumulated elements, nearly done with its hydrogen burning. Earth moves through both of them in this single sanctuary.
Today is March 16. Equal day and equal night for Missouri. The equinox is the pivot point of the whole year, the moment when neither hemisphere is tilted toward or away from the Sun, when light and dark hold exactly the same measure. And this sanctuary has felt exactly like that: balanced, present, full.
Everything is turning green. The grasses have started growing again, so in my daily walk through the woods with the goats, taking them out to graze, I also fill a basket for the rabbits. Both the twenty grow-outs that are now fourteen weeks old, and our six adult rabbits that we use to breed. The four does each have six kits they are nursing full time. We are in rabbit abundance right now, which is its own particular kind of wild fullness.
Sprouts are coming up in the garden, in the yard, in the woods. The wild edibles and medicinals are arriving: wild bergamot, wild carrot, regular violet and dog tooth violet, wood sorrel, clovers, self heal, yarrow, plantain, mullein, goldenrod, evening primrose. The dogwoods have their first leaves in the woods. And the redbuds are filled with pink blossoms this week, that particular shocking pink against bare grey branches that means spring is here.
The Earth is waking up from her long slumber. My body knows it the same way the land knows it, as embodied fact. Something that was held all winter is releasing. The basket I carry through the woods fills itself. The goats graze with a particular purposefulness that they don’t have in winter. The rabbits are producing life at a rate that is almost comical. Everything is doing what it was built to do.
With the warming of the Earth in the midwest comes tornadoes. We experienced our first one while living here last night. It lifted our solar panels off the roof and ripped the wires out of them. Several of our neighbors had their entire barns strewn about their pastures. We are grateful that the damage we received did not affect our sleep, our home, our comfort. It is an inconvenience not having full power, but even with two panels instead of six, we can charge things during the day. It will just have us not using power in the evenings until they get fixed.
This is the thing about equinox energy, it is not gentle. The balance between winter and summer is not a stillness, it is a pressure system. Two enormous forces of seasonal energy pressing against each other, and where they meet, the air spins. The tornado is not separate from the spring. It is the spring, expressing itself at full force. Denebola spinning so fast it has flattened its own body. The atmosphere of Missouri doing the same thing at a different scale.
There is something I have been sitting with in this sanctuary that is hard to write, because it is not a thought. It is a felt sense that arrived when I submitted the dissertation and has been deepening ever since.
I am in my body in a way I didn’t know was possible. The years of doctoral work required a particular kind of sustained mental production, holding enormous amounts of information, argument, structure, citation, that I now understand took me partially out of my body as a chronic condition. Not dramatically, not in a way I would have named as dissociation. Just a persistent tilt toward the cognitive, away from the physical and somatic.
When I submitted it, something came back. I have been outside every single day in this sanctuary, which is not new. I am always outside. But the quality of the presence is different. Walking through the woods with the goats is not a task I am doing while my mind is somewhere else. It is the thing itself. The basket filling with greens is the thing itself. The pink of the redbuds landing in my eyes and staying there.
Zavijava is a star that has been doing its work for nearly 3 billion years. It is metal-rich because of that, carrying in its outer layers the accumulated products of all that sustained fusion, all that steady burning. There is something that happens when you finish a long piece of work. Not emptiness. Weight. Good weight. The kind that comes from having actually done something over a long period of time. I feel heavier in my body right now in the best possible sense. More present in it. More here.
And Denebola is 36 light years away, spinning wildly, not yet settled, building its debris disk into whatever it will eventually become. Both of those things feel true simultaneously. The completion of one long cycle of becoming. The beginning of something that doesn’t have a name yet.
The Earth is waking up. I am waking up with her. The palpable shift in this sanctuary is real, I have been so embodied that writing has felt almost beside the point. The land is teaching directly, without translation. I am just trying to stay inside it long enough to bring some of it back.