We are exploring where the EARTH is holding space in the sky, rather than the sun. Learning how to experience the cosmos through our place in it.
There’s something profoundly settling about this stretch of space. Earth travels through Sanctuary 7 from December 11-21 this year, and already so much has been experienced and felt during this time.
My daughter turned thirteen here, in this exact passage of space. Elnath means “the butting” in Arabic, this fierce assertive force, and yet what actually happened was the opposite of fierce. For her birthday it was a Chinese buffet with friends. Getting her foundation matched at Ulta, and buying mascara. With someone in line seeing her holding her giant birthday balloon from the dollar tree, and handing her $20 with a happy birthday.. Requesting breakfast biscuits and cheesecake. And yet all this simplicity was her best birthday yet, she said, and she meant it. She’s learning what this sanctuary knows, this stretch between the horn and the head: that simplicity isn’t deprivation, it’s clarity.
So let me share what’s actually out there in this slice of cosmos that Earth is currently experiencing.
The Actual Landscape of this Sanctuary
Elnath is a chemically peculiar B7 giant star, about five times the mass of the Sun, burning at temperatures reaching 13,824 Kelvin, roughly 2.3 times hotter than our Sun. What makes it remarkable is its strange chemistry. It’s a mercury-manganese star with unusually large signatures of heavy elements, notable for high abundance of manganese but little calcium and magnesium. The manganese abundance is 25 times greater than the Sun’s, while calcium and magnesium are only one-eighth solar.
This is a star that doesn’t follow the expected patterns. It’s evolved off the main sequence into its giant phase, pumping out 682 times more energy than our Sun, rotating at a blistering 59 kilometers per second. And here’s something curious: Elnath has two Bayer designations, both Beta Tauri and Gamma Aurigae, because it was once considered to be shared by both constellations until modern boundaries were fixed in 1930. It belongs to two places at once, this boundary star.
Elnath is a spectroscopic binary, meaning it has an unseen companion detected through radial velocity measurements, though there’s no published information about the companion or its orbit. There’s also a faint visual companion at 33.4 arcseconds separation, though it’s likely not physically associated. What we see is what gets complicated when you look closer. The simple bright point becomes a system, becomes mysteries within mysteries.
And then across this sanctuary, at the far end, sits Meissa. Lambda Orionis. This is where things get truly wild. Meissa is an O8 giant star, one of the hottest stars you can see with the naked eye, burning at around 35,000 to 37,689 Kelvin. That’s roughly 6.5 times hotter than our Sun. It has about 28 solar masses, is about 10 times the Sun’s radius, and radiates an astonishing 165,000 times more solar luminosity, most of it in the invisible ultraviolet part of the spectrum.
But Meissa isn’t alone. It’s a multiple star system with a companion star, Lambda Orionis B, separated by just 4.41 arcseconds, a blue-white main sequence star of spectral type B0.5 V with its own impressive 10 solar masses and surface temperature of 25,400 Kelvin, pumping out 6,300 solar luminosities. There’s even a third, more distant component, an F8 V main sequence star that may have a brown dwarf companion.
What’s remarkable is that Meissa is the dominant member of a five million year old star-forming region known as the Lambda Orionis cluster, or Collinder 69. The intense ultraviolet energy pouring from this star is creating the Sh2-264 H II region in the neighboring volume of space, which is surrounded by an expanding ring of cool gas that has an age of about two to six million years. This expansion might be explained by a former binary companion of Meissa that became a Type II supernova. Such an event would also explain Meissa’s peculiar velocity with respect to the center of the expanding ring, as the explosion and resulting mass loss could have literally kicked Meissa out of the system.
Think about that. A star so violent in its death that it flung its companion across space, creating this enormous ring of gas 150 light years across. And we’re passing through the electromagnetic environment shaped by that ancient catastrophe, by that stellar death and this remaining star’s fierce burning.
Personal Experiences with this Sanctuary
I’ve been watching my healing this week. My finger, so slow to finish its healing. New skin regenerating. Life has downshifted again, the way it did moving through this sanctuary. Not stopped, but slowed. Full but spacious. There’s no rush, but the week has been packed. My daughter’s birthday on the 11th. Helping a friend pack up her whole house, saying “see you soon” instead of goodbye as she moves to another state. Saturday I dropped potions off. Sunday I took the entire day to just watch shows with my daughter. Monday I finally got all my hides soaking in a brine acid solution. Yesterday, I dropped more potions off and then my husband, kids and I grabbed building materials from my friend who moved, stuff she said we could have.
My daughter is already dreaming up her earthen house, wanting to draw up plans, wanting to start digging. She’s thirteen and she knows what she wants to build on this land. Meanwhile I’m moving through days with this grounded peace, this sense of time stretched out properly, nothing compressed, and nothing rushed.
The sanctuary between butting force of Elnath and the exploded, fierce burning of Meissa. Between assertion and awareness. Between doing and dreaming.
This is the sanctuary of simplicity that contains complexity. Of days that are full but not frantic. Of healing that takes its time. Of thirteen-year-old girls who find their best birthday in breakfast biscuits and dollar store balloons, who dream of building earthen houses while the actual Earth carries them through the electromagnetic wake of supernovae and the strange light of chemically peculiar giants.
I’ve noticed how time moves here, stretched and spacious even when there’s much to do. Helping friends move. Processing hides. Gathering building materials. Watching shows. Each thing gets its proper weight, its proper duration. Nothing compressed into urgency. The finger healing slowly because that’s how long healing actually takes when you’re not rushing it.
The violence and the strangeness present themselves as calm markers in the night sky. The complexity shows up as clarity. This is what this sanctuary teaches. Not that complicated things become simple, but that simplicity can hold enormous complexity without becoming cluttered. That a thirteen-year-old’s best birthday can be genuinely simple and genuinely full. That a week can be packed with tasks and suffused with peace.
What I keep noticing is how the peace isn’t passive. It’s not absence of activity. It’s activity without urgency.
Finally getting the hides finally getting their soak after waiting weeks to allow my finger to heal, and get them into a brine that is not frozen. Touching the very things that gave my finger the staph infection in the first place. Not fearing the process of tanning, but allowing my body to heal up enough to continue the process.
And then there’s the freeze. The Midwest has been locked in cold for the past week, temperatures dropping to 6 degrees overnight here, while other places get buried in snow and ice. Washington has been flooding for days, levees breaking under the pressure of too much water while we’re dealing with water that won’t flow at all. We’ve been turning off our water every night as our lines will freeze, living without it for a couple of days at a stretch. Earth herself is feeling this energy, this compression, and this testing of what holds and what breaks under pressure.
But here’s what’s remarkable: winter isn’t scary this year for me. We’ve settled into the depth of the cold. We’re cozy with our wood stove. And on days like today, when I wake to 34 degrees outside, it feels almost warm. The body acclimated. The mind adjusted. What was shocking becomes normal, and then what was normal starts feeling almost balmy by comparison.
The ability to acclimate is a powerful and striking thing, and I’m in awe every time I experience it. This isn’t about toughing it out or enduring hardship. It’s about the body actually shifting its baseline, the nervous system recalibrating what “cold” means, what “warm” means. Six degrees becomes the new reference point, and suddenly 34 degrees is practically spring weather. This is the power of the human animal, when it is allowed to experience the extremes.
This is what Sanctuary 7 teaches in the body while Earth moves through this stellar environment. Elnath at 13,824 Kelvin seems cool compared to Meissa’s 35,000 Kelvin, even though both would vaporize us instantly. It’s all relative. It’s all about what you’re comparing to, what you’re acclimating to, and what your current baseline is.
Earth moves through this sanctuary at about one degree per day, taking roughly ten to eleven days to traverse from Elnath to Meissa. Earth experiencing her own version of Elnath to Meissa, from one extreme to another, from drought to deluge, from freeze to flood, all happening simultaneously across her surface as she moves through this sanctuary’s electromagnetic field.
And we acclimate. The body learns. 34 degrees feels warm when 6 degrees was the baseline. The nervous system recalibrates. What was unbearable becomes normal, and then what was normal becomes almost pleasant. This isn’t suffering or endurance. This is the stunning capacity of living systems to adjust their reference points, to find new normals, to make peace with conditions that would have seemed impossible just days before.
That’s what this sanctuary holds. The space where you’re not quite at the action yet, but you’re not stuck in abstract dreaming either. You’re in the planning, the gathering, and the slow healing, the spacious days where somehow everything that needs to happen finds its time. You’re in the acclimating, the adjusting, the body learning what it can handle, and what warmth actually means when the reference point shifts.
This is Sanctuary 7. Where Earth learns, year after year, that simplicity isn’t about having less, it’s about experiencing clearly what you actually have. Where we learn that acclimation isn’t about toughening up, it’s about the body’s stunning capacity to recalibrate, to find new normals, and to make peace with what is. Where complexity shows up as clarity, where violence appears as peace, where the impossible becomes ordinary, and where what’s ordinary suddenly reveals itself as miraculous.