Walking home with Jupiter

Reflections on those small moments that guide us

Jupiter used to walk me home at night.

I was 23, a fresh water pebble plucked from its quiet shore and dropped in someone else’s fish tank.

I’ve written a lot about my time living in San Francisco. It was a short-lived time of only two years, and now it was long ago, but it was one of the most formative times of my life, and yet, I struggled there. It is only now, some 12 years since I moved away, that I’m beginning to understand the depths of my struggle there, and why. But the struggles and why are for another time, right now I’m here to talk about Jupiter.

In the evenings, when the sun began to set early, I’d leave the office for home, look up at the sky and see Jupiter sitting there. It felt like a secret. It wasn’t the moon, which everyone recognized; it was a planet, which, to the untrained eye, most assumed was a star. And so this secret would guide me home each night, acting as my beacon, during the many nights I knew I was supposed to feel immense excitement but instead felt completely lost.

Don’t get me wrong, San Francisco was exciting. In many ways, it was a dream, both in its experience and in its fleeting nature. But the core of me was shaken, and it was Jupiter that kept me grounded. My walks home felt meditative. I’d count my steps—one, two, three, four—look up, and still Jupiter hung in the sky.

As the seasons shifted, Jupiter remained, only positioned in a different portion of the sky at a different time of the night. In the middle of the night, when my anxiety would creep, I’d open my eyes and look out my bedroom window; Jupiter shone brightly in the night sky.

When I moved across the country and then back again to the West Coast, I was sure to find Jupiter at night. Unexpectedly, though, Jupiter would often find me first. I’d look up—an unintentional glance, sometimes mid-conversation, sometimes closing the blinds at night— and there it would shine, one of the brightest in the sky.

When I met my husband, we bonded over our shared, slightly nerdy love for Jupiter. Call it a coincidence, a sign, the stars aligning, a planet—we’ve both held tightly to our love for it, and each other.

And now with our children, I point it out. They don’t understand it now, but I know one day they’ll look up at the moon with the thousands of other eyes and see Jupiter humbly to its side, awaiting their glance, grounding them into the Earth.

That teeny little dot at the bottom right of the moon is Jupiter—the massive, beautiful ball of gas. Kim Kimberlin photo.

Insomnia still visits me from time to time. But I no longer fight it. Instead of spiralling over lost sleep, I embrace the quiet, for sometimes it’s the only time within a 24-hour cycle I have to myself.

Last night, around 3 a.m., I woke and looked out my window. There was Jupiter, a tiny speck beside the Moon, so small that in my photograph it could be nothing more than a fleck of dust or a glitch from my camera’s sensor. Another one of those minuscule moments that are easy to pass over,

but for those of us who are able to stop and look up into the quiet,

to embrace the stillness,

the sense of being small in such a vast universe,

we know.

We know we’ve found all we’re looking for.

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