Tarf & The Void
January 15 – January 26 115.716° – 128.572°I felt it the moment Earth shifted into this sanctuary. Not gradually, not subtly, but like walking straight into a wall of resistance. Like the air itself had thickened into something I had to push through with every movement, every task, every breath.
Pudding. That’s what it feels like. Trying to move through pudding.
Sanctuary 9 had been flowing. Insights were coming clear and fast, patterns I’d been trying to see for years suddenly visible. I could finally articulate what had been nagging at me about the Trump administration’s base: these anti-government militia types, the “don’t tread on me” crowd who somehow got convinced that this administration isn’t government at all, that it’s here to “drain the swamp.” The religious propaganda worked perfectly: obey authority at all costs. They got duped into turning against their own neighbors while thinking they were fighting tyranny. The pattern was so clear in Sanctuary 9. I could see it, name it, and understand the mechanism.
And then yesterday hit.
Everything became hard. Energy-intensive. Futile.
The rabbits keep escaping their tractors. Not once. Not twice. All throughout the day, I turn around and there are rabbits free-ranging in the yard. At least two of them every couple of hours, munching on whatever they can find, staying close but out.
I get them all secured. I check the tractors. I make sure everything is fastened. And then a few hours later, there they are again. Free.
They’re not running away. They’re staying close to the farm. This isn’t actually a crisis. I can see that intellectually. But it’s getting to me in a way it wouldn’t have even two days ago. The repetition. The futility of it. The feeling that no matter what I do, I’m going to turn around and find them out again.
It’s like the universe is showing me that containment is impossible. That everything wants to break free. That my attempts at order are just temporary illusions that will dissolve the moment I turn my back.
I thought I was getting the goat pink eye under control. I’ve been doing colloidal silver cleanings, staying on top of it, and managing the symptoms. And then I woke up yesterday to find one of the baby goats with eyes that were just a mess. Swollen, crusty, painful to look at.
This morning, the other baby.
I don’t have a way to quarantine them. I can’t separate them from the herd. So I’m fighting this infection in everyone at once. All four goats. Morning and night. Cleaning eyes, applying treatment, and still watching it spread despite everything I’m doing.
It feels like fighting a tide. Like I’m managing symptoms without actually addressing the root, and the infection knows it. It’s staying one step ahead of me, finding the vulnerable ones, the babies, the ones whose immune systems can’t handle it yet.
Four goats. Eight eyes. Twice a day. Every day. For however long this takes.
And the resistance I feel while doing it. The heaviness. Like even this simple task of caring for my animals has become something I have to wade through.
I’ve been filming myself filling sandbags every day. Building materials for an earthen dome structure for the rabbit colony. It’s been this meditative practice, this documentation of slow, steady progress toward something I’m creating.
Yesterday, I couldn’t get the energy to go. No matter how hard I tried, it was like wading through that same pudding. My body felt heavy. My motivation felt distant. I kept telling myself to just go do it, just film the sandbag filling like I do every day, and I couldn’t make myself move.
Finally, I pushed through the resistance. Finally, I said okay, I’ll do it now. I walked out to where the sand is, ready to film, ready to document this continuation of the work.
My phone was at 9%.
Too low to film.
The futility of that moment. The way I’d fought so hard against the resistance just to arrive at an obstacle I couldn’t have predicted. The feeling that even when I manage to move through the pudding, there’s something else waiting to stop me.
I didn’t fill the sandbags yesterday.
Minnesota is worse than what we’re seeing reported. Mass ICE arrests. Shootings. Federal agents kidnapping children from schools. Ordinary people in cities all over the country experiencing the chaos of their own government turning against them.
The world is becoming a war zone, and it’s being done by our own federal officials.
And in a very insignificant, small, not at all what is happening in Minnesota way, there is small chaos happening here on my small farm.
The rabbits escaping. The pink eye spreading. The sandbags not getting filled. These tiny, manageable problems that feel completely unmanageable. The natural order of my little ecosystem revealing itself as chaos that I’m constantly trying to contain, constantly trying to control, and it keeps breaking through my attempts.
It’s bringing up this feeling that maybe chaos is the natural order of things. That creation itself is chaotic. That my attempts at management, control, and creating systems that work, are just human arrogance in the face of something that was never meant to be contained.
The federal government is chaos pretending to be order.
My farm is chaos that I’ve been pretending I could organize.
Maybe they’re both just showing their true nature right now. Maybe this sanctuary is stripping away the illusion that any of us have control over anything.
My Master’s degree diploma arrived in the mail yesterday.
Right as Earth shifted into this sanctuary. Right as everything became pudding and resistance and futile repetition.
There it was. Official documentation of something I achieved. Proof that I completed something difficult, that I saw it through, that I earned this recognition.
And I looked at it and felt… what? Not nothing. But not what I expected to feel either.
Pride, yes. Accomplishment. But also this strange disconnect.
But I rallied everyone to get dressed and go out to eat. To mark the occasion so it didn’t just go by without acknowledgment.
Then to see how much a piece of paper. A title. Really means to society.
So I will continue writing my dissertation, because even though this moment might feel futile, I know it still means something to me. It is over 2 decades of learning, growing, healing, and helping others, that is culminated into that piece of paper. And that still means something.
Tarf. An orange K-type giant sitting 290 to 300 light years away, burning at just 3,990 Kelvin, cool by stellar standards, cooler than our Sun. It has expanded enormously over its nearly 2 billion years of life, reaching 61 times the Sun’s radius. It gives off roughly 660 to 870 times the Sun’s luminosity from that vast, cool, expanded surface.
Tarf is a barium star. This is its most remarkable physical quality. A barium star carries in its outer atmosphere an overabundance of heavy elements, barium, strontium, and carbon elements that don’t belong there by normal stellar chemistry. They arrived through mass transfer from a companion star that has since collapsed into a white dwarf. The dead companion is gone. But what it gave, the heavy elements it produced in its final burning phase and breathed across the space between them, is permanently written into Tarf’s spectrum. You can read the ghost of the dead star in the chemistry of the living one.
Tarf also has an exoplanet, a gas giant nearly 8 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting every 605 days. And a wide red dwarf companion separated by 2,600 astronomical units, orbiting so slowly the period exceeds 76,000 years.
After Tarf, this slice of sky is largely empty. The coordinates between Tarf and Acubens contain no major catalogued stars, just open space. Earth moves through a void.
The name Tarf itself is Arabic for “the end” or “the edge.” It marks the outermost reach before open space. The star that sits at the boundary, carrying the chemical signature of everything that collapsed beside it, before the void opens.
This sanctuary is revving everything into hyperdrive. Not making things move faster, but making everything require more energy to do the same tasks.
Filling sandbags shouldn’t be this hard. Securing rabbit tractors shouldn’t feel this depleting. Cleaning goat eyes shouldn’t take this much will.
But it does. All of it does. Because I’m not just doing the physical tasks. I’m pushing through resistance that wasn’t there before. I’m fighting against this quality of space that makes everything feel futile, repetitive, and impossible to complete.
Tarf is an old expanded giant doing the slow, cool work of its final burning phase. It is not young and fast. It is not spinning wildly like Denebola or building new worlds. It is enormous, cool, and carrying the accumulated weight of everything that happened beside it, the dead companion’s chemistry permanently embedded in its spectrum, the heavy elements it didn’t produce itself but received, absorbed, and now carries as its own signature.
That’s what this feels like. Not just managing my farm. Managing my farm while carrying everything: the weight of federal chaos, of governmental violence, of systems collapsing, of the world becoming something I don’t recognize. While trying to hold onto achievement that feels disconnected from who I’m becoming. While the void opens up in front of me: eleven degrees of open, empty sky after Tarf, before the next star.
Everything is taking energy because I’m moving through the edge of something, and then into nothing. Tarf is the last marker. Then open space.
Tarf stands at 115.716°, the opening degree of this slice. The name means the end, the edge, the outermost point. After Tarf, the sky goes quiet..
It’s not the swarm dynamics of Praesepe in Sanctuary 11, where a thousand stars all pull at each other and everything happens at once. It’s the opposite. One ancient star carrying the chemical signature of its dead companion, burning slow and cool and vast, standing at the edge and then nothing. Open space. The void that the name itself predicts.
The sacred embodied human animal in open space with no anchor point goes inward. Conserves. Slows. Processes invisibly. Not depression. Not laziness. Integration of what Sanctuary 9 cracked open. The body doing the work the mind doesn’t know how to do yet.
The natural order is not chaos here. It is stillness. Expansion. The strange weight of an old star carrying what its dead companion left behind, standing at the edge of eleven degrees of nothing.
I’m in it. In the resistance. In the heaviness. In the void that follows the edge. And I won’t let that steal my energy. We can continue pursuing our desires, passions, peace, joy, and do so with love and curiosity.
This is what the void does. It strips everything down to what is actually essential. Until you’re not managing complexity but sitting in radical simplicity. Until the rabbits escaping and the goats’ eyes and the phone at 9% are not crises but just the texture of being alive on a farm, in a body, on an Earth moving through open space.
The cluster doesn’t fall apart. Tarf keeps burning. The farm keeps functioning even when it feels like it’s falling into disorder. And Earth keeps moving through these coordinates whether I’m ready or not.
Welcome to Sanctuary 10. Let’s let go of any semblance of control we think we have, we think the universe has, and allow ourselves to succumb to the open space of creation.