Orion

I have had an attachment to the constellation Orion for as long as I can remember looking at the stars. I used to walk out into our driveway at night, round the corner of the carport, and stand beside a juniper that I had a particular fondness for because of the way it held the raindrops on the tips of its green fingers after a downpour. Right there at the start of the driveway, I was just below Orion and he above me. I would look up at him and count out the three stars of his belt before adjusting my eyes to the dark palette behind him and picking out one or two more. I knew other constellations—the dippers, of course, and Cassiopeia's chair was easy to find as well—but there was something about this hunter, this man leaping to action across the sky, that caught my attention.

There wasn't too much to the relationship back then; I just liked to leave the house at night and look up at him. Thinking about that makes me realize just how precious my home setting was, because I lived in a city, ten minutes from everything, and yet my house was surrounded by woods, and my sky was astrally lit. I lived in a city, and yet I could wander outside without my parents knowing and feel perfectly comfortable, no question of safety in my mind. I'd listen to an owl hooting or bats fluttering by; I'd watch a raccoon I knew slinking across the neighbor's lawn, heading toward cat food; I'd listen to all those trees around me shaking their leaves and soothing me toward sleep. I'd only spend five minutes out there, maybe ten, not long enough to be missed from the long, low house at the other end of which my parents slept. I'd come out and find him, take it all in, and then head for sleep.

When I was in high school, I spent a semester away from home, living on a farm in Maine. The night I arrived, I was terrified by the deep snow around me—four feet in places—and the frigid sub-zero air that made my nose hairs go rigid and turn to ice. I was nervous to enter the cabin that I would live in with nine other girls for the next four months. But it was only a few days into the experience that I realized a friend had followed me all the way to that northern forest. Walking back to the cabin one night, listening to the crunching of packed snow beneath my boots, watching the trees sway in the clear, blue light of snow-reflected-moon, thinking about a math assignment or an English essay or some science field trip we were about to undertake, I happened to look at the sky at the right moment and saw Orion perched just off the far corner of the hilltop home to which I returned. After that I took my nightly walk home slowly, often took it alone, so I could have those five minutes I used to waste just looking to whisper things to my night-time confidante.

I have never been a religious person; I have always believed that relationships with external agents—whether of the stellar or spiritual composition—are really just relationships with oneself. I may personify Orion, but I don't truly believe he is anything but an arrangement of fading gases that happen to have locked into relative place. Still, though, I appreciate the longevity of nature that constellations reveal; I appreciate the creativity of ancients—some as far back as the days of Sumerian (our first) civilization—who saw them too and named them after what they knew. But mostly I appreciate Orion for serving as one of those signposts in life that you cycle past here and there and, at each visit, are reminded to think about where you've been since the last pass.

I sometimes chuckle over what city people I am surrounded by in San Francisco, where I moved in hopes of regenerating my connection to nature, which suffered heavily from the chills of ten New England winters (during many of which I stayed mostly inside). It may be a green city, but it's a city! I tell myself, amused now by my earlier expectation. One night a friend and I made our way out of the city; how long, she commented, it had been since she'd seen a starry night. I smiled quietly, remembering something I read half a lifetime ago in a Neruda poem ("Las Estrellas"). I smiled not at her mistake but at my own knowing; you can see the stars in San Francisco any time the fog frees up the sky. And if you stand on my street, about two-thirds of the way toward the far sidewalk and two or three car lengths up the block, when you look at my house your eyes will rise, because above it Orion lingers, waiting for my next thought.