7 Star Circling
In Everyone’s Life There Comes A Time

Coming … here’s where you will find all the things that Del is working on:

In the meantime, this is why it’s called 7 Star Circling:

When I was 40 years old, an experience unfolded that quietly, yet permanently, altered how I saw my life and the world.

I grew up in the country, far from cities and cultural events, and often felt different from those around me, oddly out of place, as if I was waiting for something I couldn’t name.

My father was a logger, and when I was five, he began taking me to the woods with him. My “job” was to carry wedge buckets, measuring sticks, and sledgehammers from tree to tree, and to refill his chainsaws when they ran dry.

It was hard work for a child, but those days held something more for me. Every day there would be a little time that was mine alone. I would climb up into the crown of an enormous tree he had just felled, making my way out along a sturdy limb, and sit there in the stillness.

I would simply sit, listen, and observe. Looking back, I see how the practice of quietly sitting among the branches changed how I experienced life itself. As I repeated this rhythm of work and stillness, I began to see things differently.

As I grew older, I realized that living “in the boonies” did not give me access to things I wanted to learn about. Without having a local culture to plug into, I found my own.

I studied Native American people and their ways and felt an immediate resonance with their relationship to land, spirit, and story.

A tiny advertisement in an obscure newspaper for transcendental meditation caught my eye one day, and I knew instantly that I had to follow it. That small notice opened a doorway into formal meditation practice.

Over time, I became a sweat lodge leader after learning about the sweat lodge from Wallace Black Elk, and I continued my learning with Rolling Thunder, Tom Brown Jr., and Grandmother Twylah Nitsch.

Their teachings deepened the sense that the natural world and the unseen world were intimately connected and always communicating.

I also took up martial arts, which further sharpened my awareness of the unity of body, mind, and spirit, and the way disciplined practice can prepare a person for sudden insight.

It was after a martial arts class that the experience at the heart of “7 Star Circling” occurred.

It was a late summer evening, and I had just finished a training session in Ichi and Goshen Jutsu and was driving home along dark country roads.

Our house sat on a hill far from town, with no ambient light from street lamps or neighbors. That night the sky was so clear it seemed to have been washed clean, and the stars shone with a kind of crystal sharpness.

I pulled into the driveway, parked, got out of the car, and began walking casually toward the front door.

Something drew my attention upward, so I paused to take in the stars and marvel at the sheer depth of the night sky.

Directly overhead, I saw the Pleiades—the Seven Sisters, a tight little cluster of seven stars—shining with no haze or distortion.
As I watched, those seven stars began to move. They started circling, round and round, turning in a slow, deliberate dance. I stood dumbfounded, wondering if I had lost my mind.

To check myself, I looked away from the sky, down to the driveway, to the house, to the trees and the surrounding land, making sure everything else was normal. It all seemed perfectly ordinary.

Then I looked back up, fully expecting the seven stars to be back in their usual, fixed positions. They were not. They were still circling.

The Seven Sisters continued their circular motion, and I remained there for some time, simply watching, feeling both stunned and strangely calm. I have never seen them move like that again.

But that one night changed everything.

In many cultures, the Pleiades are symbols of guidance, transformation, and connection between earth and sky, often associated with new beginnings and spiritual awakening.

That meaning fit exactly what I felt: that I had been given a sign, a confirmation that all the threads of my life—Nature, Native American Teachings, Martial Arts—were weaving together into a new pattern.

Which I now represent as the idea of “7 Star Circling: In Everyone’s Life There Comes a Time” and a new season in my life where I share what I have learned with those who are willing to see.- Delbert Lee Piper, Sr.