The Engineer Who Reads the Stars

Finding Science in Our Stories

I stood with my sons under the winter sky, watching their breath form clouds in the frigid air as they traced Orion's belt with mittened fingers. "Why did people make pictures in the stars?" my oldest asked.

As an engineer, my instinct was to explain mechanics of the stars and how humans like to recognize patterns. But as a mother—as a human being connected to thousands of generations who gazed at these same stars—I knew there was more to the story.

I've spent my professional life in precision, in measurements and calculations where feelings have no place. But I've always sensed something missing in our modern understanding—a disconnect between the technical knowledge we've gained and the wisdom we've lost.

This disconnect haunts me. I find myself standing in the liminal space between worlds: analytical enough to trace the alignments of the stars in both ancient monuments and modern churches, yet sensitive enough to feel the weight of meaning these alignments carried for our ancestors.

I feel like a witch who doesn't yet know how to use her powers. I've been hiding under the shell of someone shy, someone who feels deeply but hesitates to speak. The engineer who measures, calculates, and verifies has been reluctant to acknowledge the person who dreams, who grieves, who senses connections across time. And I’ve seen the backlash of some of the reactions when totally, brutally honest.

But here's what I've discovered: When we approach our oldest traditions with both scientific precision and emotional openness, something remarkable happens. The stories that seemed like mere superstition reveal themselves as sophisticated cultural technologies—methods for encoding knowledge of the stars, connections to earthly planting wisdom, and psychological insight into ways that could be easily remembered in forms that are able to survive through countless generations.

The Santa who descends through chimneys carries echoes of shamanic traditions linked to observations of the stars. The divine child born mid winter, on the solstice embodies the measurable reality of light returning after darkness. The Easter traditions reflect precise calculations of the movements of the sun and moon marking spring's return, still seen in modern disagreements over the complex dating of Easter every year—while also revealing the systematic erasure of feminine divine presence, a fact that affects men as much as it does women, preserving fertility symbols and a balance of forces needed to create life, preserving what revisionist history attempted to remove.

These aren't coincidences. They're evidence of our ancestors' brilliant solution to preserving essential knowledge in pre-literate societies—embedding astronomical science within emotional narratives that would be remembered, repeated, and cherished.

My work exists at this intersection—applying an engineer's eye to folklore and finding the science buried within our stories. It's about reconnecting what should never have been separated: our analytical understanding of the cosmos and our emotional experience of belonging to it.

This bridge-building isn't just academically interesting—it's healing. When we recognize that our most meaningful traditions have roots in actual patterns in the stars, we reconnect with both our ancestors' wisdom and our own direct experience. We find our place in time's great spiral, simultaneously honoring the precision of science and the power of story.

And what I find most beautiful of all is that children are at the center of these celebrations, of the mystery behind love creating life. Each newborn is seen as cherished as the newborn sun. At their core, these stories equate life on Earth with stories of the skies, making each life born as epic as the daily birth of the sun and its annual renewal. It is cosmic timing mapped on human time.

Creating in the In-Between Moments

This work happens in the margins of life—in the precious spaces between professional obligations and maternal responsibilities. I feel that never-ending pull of wanting to be everywhere at once to help those that I love, knowing it could become a bottomless pit of energy depletion. I've learned that I have a finite amount of energy and that my children deserve all of it. Not just the remnants of me, but the best parts.

Children are so happy to receive your attention in these first ten years of their life—time you never get back. They need my happiness, my ways of seeing the world that hopefully can benefit them. They are the blooms on the trees that we create, the pieces of us that survive.

I write in stolen moments: waiting in school pickup lines, during the quiet after bedtime stories, in early morning stillness before the household wakes. My desk is perpetually covered with half-finished thoughts, notes scribbled on whatever paper was available when insight struck.

My bookshelf of unread sources grows faster than my completed chapters. Each new book offers connections I hadn't considered, perspectives that enrich the tapestry I'm trying to weave. Sometimes this feels overwhelming—this constant expansion of possibility, this awareness that I'll never read everything, understand everything, connect everything.

But I've come to recognize that this unfinished quality mirrors something important about the traditions themselves. The astronomical knowledge our ancestors encoded was never static either, but constantly evolving, being reinterpreted, finding new expressions while maintaining connection to the unchanging stars. They too worked with incomplete understanding, with partial glimpses of patterns greater than any single generation could fully map.

Like yoga, this work is never truly completed. There is no final posture, only deeper awareness, greater integration, more conscious relationship with forces larger than ourselves. The practice itself becomes the purpose—this ongoing conversation between past and present, between measurement and meaning, between the stars above and the stories within.

Following Threads of the Erased

These are my own notes on the books written by people much smarter, much more focused than me. I'm not discovering anything new—the evidence has been gathered by courageous scholars who came before. But this evidence is inherently difficult to trace. How do you document what was systematically removed? How do you prove the significance of book burnings and erasures except by their conspicuous absences?

Yet even with these challenges, enough threads remain to trace, to reverse engineer our past. Like an archaeologist reconstructing a shattered vessel from fragments, or a forensic scientist working backward from evidence to event, we can follow these remnants to glimpse what once existed in fullness.

This is emotionally hard work. It questions the nature of god herself. Many people have lost their careers, their communities, and their friends for pursuing this kind of research. When you begin pulling at these threads, you realize how deeply these narratives are woven into our cultural fabric, how uncomfortable it makes people when foundations they've never questioned begin to shift.

I wonder sometimes what my children will say to their friends when they talk about Easter or Santa or religion. Will they become inadvertent outsiders when they understand the astronomical knowledge behind the resurrection story, or the shamanic origins of the gift-bringer who descends through smoke holes in dwellings not touched by christianity? Or will this deeper understanding actually connect them more meaningfully to the human experience across cultures?

The more one travels—whether physically across continents or intellectually across traditions—the more one sees there are multiple ways of seeing the same thing. We find this pattern in both scientific communities and every religious world, no matter how apparently extreme. When we look past the surface differences in language and symbol, we are all saying the same things! We are all responding to the same pattens in the sky, the same biological laws, marking the same seasonal transitions that structured human experience long before calendars existed.

Personal Heresy: Finding Our Own Way Home

This journey began long before I recognized it as such. I lost my mom at 17, and know the deep love and deep loss that parents can bring to their children. I've felt both the joys celebrated by parents since life began and the peculiar isolation of parenthood in modern times—where we're expected to do it all without the village that traditionally supported this most fundamental human work.

The margins between worlds—between presence and absence, between traditional and modern, between what we're told and what we feel—compelled me to understand my own lost story. What happens when we lose our guides too early? When narratives compete for dominance? When we must navigate the spaces between established truths without a map? These questions weren't abstract academic inquiries but lived realities that shaped my earliest understanding of belonging.

I've often noticed how many princesses in fairy tales lost their mothers—almost all I can name. This absence creates the narrative space for the hero's journey, the quest for self-discovery without maternal guidance. But I've come to believe we don't have to lose our mothers to find ourselves. That separation may force self-discovery, but we can hold onto our families while still diving deep to find our own meaning. This idea, once again, was to drive a wedge between our parents, especially mothers, and individuals.

Understanding our past, proactively choosing our relationship with tradition rather than passively inheriting it—this is like any profound relationship. We move through stages: norm, storm, perform. First accepting the formal structures, then battling with what doesn't make sense, challenging inconsistencies, wrestling with contradictions. Only after this struggle can we truly flow, truly perform within (or without) the tradition with both authenticity and freedom.

This process requires breaking through elements that no longer make sense in modern religious expressions—especially aspects of Christianity that sometimes demonize what inherently means love: connection to nature, personal growth through direct experience, and the empowerment of finding one's own understanding. We must also honestly confront the colonization aspects of religious history, the ways spiritual traditions were sometimes weaponized to control rather than liberate.

Authenticity isn't just a modern value but a spiritual one—being truly who we are rather than living in fear of judgment, or divine punishment for revealing and giving in to our "primitive" selves. Yet I disagree wholeheartedly with the demonization of our ancient instincts. Our reptilian brains are the oldest parts of our neural architecture, and the most developed. It is the prefrontal cortex that sets us apart from other animals, but it is also the most recent, and least developed. Our bodies will always prioritize the animalistic instincts first, the ones that keep us alive. Those reactions will always be faster, at least until enough millions of years go by to refine the newer aspects.

What we see in the debasing of this past part of ourselves is all part of the rhetoric to separate from religions that were closer to nature, and to reframe old as outdated, and new as better, while ancient traditions always revered the past. New is not always better. Civilization does not grow in linear progression, but hits peaks and valleys. And as gender roles change, modern families—fathers and mothers alike—feel the most overwhelm in only taking more on, with only paid support rather than communal structures to help carry the load.

The demonization of love in its various expressions—whether same-sex relationships or other forms that don't fit narrow traditional models—represents perhaps the most profound contradiction in traditions supposedly centered on compassion. As long as relationships are consensual and rooted in genuine care, how can love itself ever be wrong? The pressure to hide our true selves creates a seed for pain and suffering that ripples outward, harming not just individuals but entire communities.

I would have expected religion to be fundamentally about love, and instead, in many modern expressions, it has become about control. That shift in perspective can be earth-shattering when first recognized. But like a child who must eventually test the lessons learned from parents against direct experience, we need our own encounters with the divine, our own interpretations, our own personal "heresies" to feel spiritual truth deeply.

The alternative is to become religious zombies, following dead words without the breath of personal meaning animating them. But we can instead bring that spelling to life—quite literally seeing the "spells" in the words, recognizing how language itself carries incantatory power when infused with authentic understanding.

This personal wrestling with tradition doesn't diminish heritage but honors it in the most profound way possible—by making it vibrantly alive in our actual lives rather than preserved as a museum piece, perfect but untouchable behind glass.

Life on the Margins

My mom was an immigrant from Croatia, coming to Canada at eleven years old, fleeing the conflicts that would later splinter the temporary Yugoslavia. Though most would never know it from her poised exterior, she carried the weight of displacement, of living between worlds—between Eastern and Western Churches, between Christian and Muslim nations to the south, and between European and North American identities.

The margins between churches, the contested borderlands that shaped my family history, compelled me to understand my own lost story. What happens when cultures collide, when narratives compete for dominance, when people must navigate the spaces between established truths? These questions weren't abstract academic inquiries but lived realities that shaped my earliest understanding of belonging.

I watched my mother struggle with raising four children in the traditional role of housewife. It broke her—this never doing anything for herself, this constant service without room for personal identity or expression. There were moments of joy, of course, but also a profound erasure of self that I recognized even as a child. I see echoes of that struggle within me sometimes, feel the flash of anger that comes from giving too much without replenishment. It's something I have to both control and express—this inheritance of feminine sacrifice that flows through generations like an underground river.

The Rebellion of Reclaiming Choice

It's revealing that the word "heresy" itself comes from the Greek word meaning "choice." Throughout history, we've systematically demonized the very act of choosing for ourselves—particularly in spiritual matters. The enforcement of orthodox thinking (aka traditional, modern/old) wasn't just about being religiously correctness, if that is even a thing, but about power—who gets to decide, who must simply obey.

Yet every field of modern science points toward the importance of what traditional wisdom always knew—that flow states, and that feeling of awe make us neurologically whole, that chronic stress prevents growth at the cellular level, that each cell exists in either growth or defense mode, red or green. Neurobiology, psychology, microbiology—they all confirm what mystics have said for millennia: our state of being matters profoundly, our emotional state matters, not just for our experience in the moment, but for our physical health and development.

For children, being in growth mode is critical for mental and physical development. Organs grow differently if a pregnant mother is constantly stressed. For adults, remaining in defense mode accelerates aging as cells cannot properly regenerate. We understand now the biological basis for what more thoughtful traditions have long practiced—that presence, openness, and integration create conditions for both spiritual insight and physical wellbeing.

Our emotions live as hormones coursing through our blood. And these can be corrosive, or healing. All emotions are needed to be experienced, but we need rest from defense mode to truly flourish.

We live in a strange time—when all this information is readily available yet we're simultaneously being exploited more systematically than ever before. We need to learn to defend ourselves intellectually and spiritually without succumbing to fear that everything is inherently evil. That everything causes cancer, so just do whatever you want. We have to learn to question and be strong and vigilant, but not become perpetual victims. We can choose to learn more, to protect ourselves, to stand firmly in knowledge rather than react from fear.

Understanding our past helps us plan for the future. The more deeply our roots reach into historical knowledge, the further our blooms can extend toward new possibilities. This bridging and sharing of information has always been humanity's greatest strength—from Marcus Aurelius, whose personal notes on earlier teachings made him famous, to Jesus, who conveyed established rabbinic wisdom in ways that could survive outside the temple structures that might be destroyed. He taught you can experience the divine without needing to go to a single, specific physical holy place. He was not the first.

I find particular inspiration in scholars like Diodorus, who created summaries of ancient books that now no longer exist—preserving fragments of wisdom that would otherwise be entirely lost. This detective work of bridging unseen connections across time feels like sacred play to me, a form of service to both past and future generations.

We can all participate in this work. We all bring something new and valuable to the conversation. And just as genius studies have shown that children benefit more from exposure to diverse experiences than from narrow specialization, we adults become more robust through range rather than silos. Humans have thrived because we are scavengers, we can eat many things and live in many climates. Some may thrive better in silos, and we are lucky to have enough people to be sure those exist. We can have some grow in individual places, while others bridge topics. We can all certainly read the work of specialists in their fields, and get caught up rather quickly on the main ideas, but individually, on average, we serve the world better by developing diverse abilities and perspectives. Diverse environments are always more robust against single disasters.

We all live within scarcity. Our time is limited. To find our passions, one way is to continue the habit of reading— in whatever interests us just to preserve the habit. We will never be able to read all the books that interest us, so feel free to put books down when needed, to move on. Maintaining this practice that differs fundamentally from passive consumption of visual media. Movies can be great introductions to characters, but should be supplemental to reading. Stories, in general bring the past to life. Books create a unique freedom in our imagination partly because of the time and contemplation required between readings. Music consists of the pauses between notes, speech emerges from the vowel sounds between consonant stops. The divine lives in those pauses. Maybe thats why ancients of Egytians and Jewish writers did not record the vowels, it was like speaking God’s name in vain. We cannot rush through everything without losing the essence of what matters.

Children as Our Best Teachers

As we move onto advisor roles in life, we can pause to appreciate these special moments in time for what they are, like loving the blossoms on spring trees, knowing they—and we—will not last forever. And yet, through them, we live on. And we can be good for them, when we pay attention.

Everything becomes more beautiful because of its impermanence. Yet we also live on through our words, through what we pass to the next generation. The ancient Egyptians believed we achieved immortality when our names were written down, able to be spoken, like saying Beetlejuice 3x to bring him to life—one reason why the creation of the alphabet by Semitic peoples (who would become Jews another thousand years later) represented such a democratization of this immortality.

We are perpetually being shortsighted for instant pleasure—instant gratification, instant mouth pleasure—as opposed to looking for real nutrients that actually taste good. We've become addicted to dopamine hits rather than the genuine satisfaction that comes from the highs and lows of sustainable pleasures: the changing of the seasons, the beauty of sunrises and sunsets that regulate our hormones and sleep cycles. There's genius in following these patterns, in waking with the sun and resting with darkness. There's genius in making these natural transitions beautiful to us.

I work harder knowing this work itself is a rebellion. A rebellion from all the other things demanding my time. I was always a rule follower, priding myself on getting 100% on all tests and assignments. Now I find myself challenging those very assumptions constantly. I feel compelled to stand up for those silenced for too long—even the mushrooms that create vast underground networks of connection and the wildflowers that bring nutrients from the depths of soil even when repeatedly cut down. A weed is just a flower with a derogatory name. These persistent, resilient beings have so much to teach us about surviving oppression while maintaining connection.

In the end, perhaps this work of recovering erased wisdom, of reintegrating the feminine divine, of reconnecting astronomical knowledge with spiritual meaning, isn't just about understanding our past. It's about reclaiming our fundamental right to choose—to interpret, to question, to find our own relationship with both cosmic patterns and inherited wisdom. It's about recognizing heresy in its original sense—not as dangerous wrongdoing but as the sacred right to choose our own understanding.

Bridging Worlds

I'm writing for parents seeking meaningful ways to celebrate with their children, for the scientifically-minded who crave more than cold facts, for the spiritually inclined who respect evidence, and for anyone who senses there's something more to our traditions than we've been taught.

And for anyone who wants to know why Santa climbs down the chimney or why women aren’t allowed be pope.

The stars have been telling stories since before humans existed to hear them. Our ancestors learned to read this language of the stars and encoded their understanding in traditions we still practice. I'm simply trying to recover the vocabulary, to translate between worlds that should never have become strangers to each other.

These aren't just stories. They're our inheritance—a legacy of astronomical knowledge wrapped in narratives powerful enough to survive untold thousands of years. And in rediscovering them, perhaps we can recover something essential about ourselves.

My determination to continue despite the challenges of creating in life's margins comes from a deep conviction that this work matters—not because it will ever be complete, but because each fragment of connection restored offers something valuable: a way of standing in that liminal space between analytical precision and emotional wisdom, between ancient understanding and modern insight. Like the practice of yoga, the work is never complete, the position never mastered. Instead we crave something that brings us back, like every breath, every piece of food, and every wave of the ocean. We must live and breath these new understandings over and over again, especially when the pull of modern life is so fragmented, and makes us feel we are always working against a current.

In the end, perhaps that's what our ancestors were doing too—finding ways to preserve what mattered most in the limited time they had, knowing future generations would continue the work of understanding the patterns that connect us all.

And remember: you were your ancient ancestor’s dream come true.

Thought Exercise:

I believe we need to study and understand ourselves holistically—from the fuel we put into our bodies, to the environments we place ourselves in, to our responses to it all. We must expand that view to include our interactions and impact, not only on our own bodies and minds, but on our ecosystems, the immediate world, the greater population, plants and animals, environment, and our successors.

Where do we draw the line of where we start and end? Can you really draw a line around the forest edge, a line that's constantly interacting with more beyond? Do you include that weed, that bird flying in and out, that raindrop about to fall? Do you count the air breathed, the view from a window miles away, the memory once gone, or the story of its existence?

We can draw artificial boundaries to say "this is my world, my home, the space where my impact ends," but how deep into the ground does that extend, how high into the sky? Are we more than what exists within our skin barrier? How does our energy change a room? How do we influence the air and interact with those around us? How far into yourself do you look, how deep into your mind where your entire universe dwells? What impact have we imprinted onto others in the few moments we've lived? Who, or what, will continue once we are gone?

I think this helps bring everything into perspective. And I would hope this inspires you to look deeper into yourself to understand more about who you are naturally, and how you connect with it all.