#scartending

A “Constellation” is what I call a grouping of quotes and essays around a particular theme and the meaning that I’ve woven from it. 

I share in this way, so that I make room for other people’s meaning alongside my own. This includes crediting my creative lineage. It allows for different voices to collaborate in making meaning. 

Stars are stars. Constellations are people’s understandings of those stars. Different constellations based on the same stars in the same sky are named and recognized according to different cultures, the people who create those cultures, and their perspective. 

Here’s an example, which comes from Clarinda Braun, founder of the Matriarchal Business. A certain group of stars—in Clarinda’s own Fijian and Samoan heritage—make up Maui’s fish hook, known to many who have watched Disney’s Moana. In Western Astrology, based on Greek myth, the same stars are Scorpius, the scorpion who killed Orion and gives us the name for the “Scorpio” zodiac. (More here.) 

They are two interpretations of the same group of stars, but both constellations are valid. Both constellations are also specific to a rooted culture, and those cultures have flavored the constellations with stories containing different meanings. 

Regardless of the meaning we humans give them, the stars are the stars. They don’t change. The stories we tell about them do.

I invite you to approach the ideas here a similar way. 

In other words, it is not important to me whether or not you share my perspective by accepting my meaning. 

It is important to me that you make your own meaning, with the great confidence and resolve of knowing exactly where your ideas come from and how solidly they can hold you. 

The quotes are stars I’ve spotted. They are what they are. 

Sometimes, I include my own interior experiences as one of the stars I’ve spotted. They are events in my past, recorded as honestly as I know how to be but deeply rooted in my own memory and perspective. 

My interpretation of those quotes and my various experiences is a constellation. What I share is only one possible meaning, which I’ve woven based on what I see. Even the way I’ve gathered them, i.e. what I include and what I don’t, creates a certain meaning. 

Often, upon finding new stars, whether they be quotes or interior experiences, I refine my own meaning. So even my interpretation is fluid. This approach is helpful when meaning itself is morphing, which happens often when you explore beyond what you were initially taught to believe and begin to see the world with a changed gaze. 

Perhaps you see stars I haven’t noticed, or maybe you see the same stars from a different angle. If you see something different than I do, then that’s your own constellation. 

That’s the power and limitation of perspective, and although we’ve all seen ugly versions of this, there are also really beautiful versions of this.

There is room in the same stars for both Maui’s fish hook and the Scorpion. 

There is room for your interpretation and mine--and someone else’s too.