AncienTrails

An Old College Friend Comes To Call

Samhain                                         Waning Dark Moon

Standing on my deck, below a clear night sky, the stars shine, recalling Orion, the friend from the night watchman’s shack these many years ago, a college job, earning money on the weekend.   Back then, 1968, Orion and I made a life-long pact, as long as my life anyhow, that we would remember each other and visit each winter.  We’ve kept to it and each late fall, about this time, I began to search for Orion in the night sky.

By this hour he has risen above the eastern horizon, but remains low for the early part of the night.  Later on he will emerge high around 8 p.m.

It’s strange, but Orion is the strongest link I have to those college days, when money was tight and I wandered the factory late at night with a watchman’s clock, visiting small key posts, making sure the plant stayed safe, on one occasion blowing up an egg in an early microwave, sleepy from the late hour.

How do we make friends with the inanimate, embracing a tree, a landscape, a constellation as an intimate, bringing into our inner world a thing, challenging thereby our notion of the thing as a thing, creating in our Self a union of flesh and starry heavens? This question goes to the heart of our post-industrial age, when we have feasted at the table of manufactory to our fill and now face a challenge from the world we have remade, a challenge to our future and the future of other living organisms.

How can we bring into our collective Selves a friendship with the four-legged, the flying forms and those with fins, not only them, but the earth on which they walk, the sky in they soar, the water in which they swim?  If we cannot make this link between our Selves and the intricate web within which we exist, it will no longer favor us.  And we will die.