FROM THE FIELDS TO THE STARS. This item is unavailable.FROM THE FIELDS TO THE STARS

This memoir brings together and substantially expands the stories first told in my three earlier memoirs -Under the Midnight Sky, I followed a Different Star, and Tree Time: Living on Nature’s Clock-reimagining them as one unified story of a life shaped by curiosity, faith, service, and the people who helped along the way. Readers who encountered those books will find familiar ground here, expanded and reframed with substantial new material and presented through two complementary voices for the first time.

What This Book Is Really About
A high school teacher once told Geoffrey Yoder that because he grew up on a small Pennsylvania dairy farm, he would always be a farmer.

He retired as Acting Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate — overseeing 114 missions and the James Webb Space Telescope program.

But From the Fields to the Stars is not the story of an unlikely journey to NASA.

It is the story of the ordinary people whose quiet acts of faith, generosity, encouragement, and compassion transformed one life — and the responsibility that comes with passing those gifts forward.

A Vietnam veteran who enrolled in a community college class he did not need to take, because he understood that presence is the whole of what mentorship is. A neighbor who brought groceries to the door and said he had extra. A faith chosen at thirteen — not inherited but decided — that carried a farm boy through a brother's terminal illness, a best friend's murder, a blood clot from hip to ankle, and thirty-two years of public service.

The Pillars of Creation are 6,500 light-years away. The light reaching the James Webb Space Telescope left those structures before the pyramids were built. The farm boy who grew up beneath the dark skies of western Pennsylvania helped build the instrument that received it.

To hear is to be heard.