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 never become more than 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.
From Farm Fields...
Imagine growing up on a small dairy farm where mornings began before sunrise and evenings ended beneath some of the darkest skies in America.
Those fields became the classroom where perseverance, responsibility, and faith first took root.
...To the Stars
Those same lessons eventually carried Geoffrey Yoder into a thirty-two-year engineering career in private industry and at NASA, helping lead some of America's most ambitious space science programs and ultimately serving in NASA leadership.
Yet the greatest discoveries were not found among the stars.
They were found in the people encountered along the way.
Two Voices. One Life.
From the Fields to the Stars is told in two registers.
The Memoir Voice moves forward through time, inside each event as it unfolds - the child at the fence line, the community college classroom, the first day at Johnson Space Center, the Columbia Space Shuttle, the James Webb Space Telescope program directorship.
The Tree Time Voice speaks from retirement, looking back at what the rings mean - what was given, what it cost, what was carried forward, and what it means to become someone else's aquifer.
The governing image is the tree. You cannot count the rings from the outside. You have to go in to find them.
This book goes in.
To hear is to be heard.
