Lughnasa Kate’s Moon
About 5:30 am this morning I left the house for the loft. The sky was clear, unusual over the past few monsoonal weeks. There in the southeast, still partially in the lodgepole pine, was Orion. His shoulder and belt were visible, his sword and feet/legs were not. But he was back. I waved to him.
As I did, I realized this relationship, with a constellation, was really important to me. Not as metaphor. Not as an anchor to my long ago college night-shift memories. But as a friendship. This may seem odd, but I suspect it’s not. I think it’s analogous to a more common feeling, one I identify most easily with crossing Ford Parkway in St. Paul on my way to our house on Edgcumbe. When I crossed Ford Parkway, I felt like I was back in home territory. I had become, at least in that way, native to the Highland Park neighborhood. When we moved to Andover, it was coming up to Round Lake, the marker of our new neighborhood.
Orion is the Ford Parkway of fall and winter for me. In that sense he is a boundary marker between the growing season and the fallow season though right now he is a harbinger. His rising means, look, the seasons will change. You can know that with confidence. This transition, from growing season to fallow one marks an affective moment for me, a moment of change from a time I tolerate with some pleasures, to one I love that has some pains.
The dangers and pains of ice and snow are real, but manageable. Cold is a blessing as far I’m concerned. The pleasure of snow is real, too. Ice? Well, maybe not so much pleasure there. But the holidays, the beauty of fall and winter landscapes, the times of being isolated with a book to write, well, that’s my best time. And Orion’s emergence heralds its coming.
There’s more than that though. Orion is a friend in the heavens. His reemergence each fall reconnects me to astronomy and the beauty of the dark night skies, the long ones of the fallow season. He is a host who invites me into his world, lifts my heart literally off the earth. Yes, I can connect with the stars during the growing season, but I tend not to, at least not as well, certainly not as often. The night sky comes later then and I don’t have a guide, a host for it.
Like a good friend does, Orion reminds me of an important of myself and nurtures it. He does this silently, of course. But I hear him just the same. No wonder I waved.
Paths. The trait of watchfulness, of being aware, is not only about self-awareness. It is, in itself, a tool, one to use to notice which direction you’re headed. Did this action, that motivation, move me in a positive direction in my life or a negative one? Did it move me toward selfishness or toward being of service?
It also requires, very interestingly, prayers for God to forgive the wicked, or the unjust. It’s not up to us to forgive them, but we must plead with God to do it. As I took it, this means that we stand against Trump and the white supremacists, for example, opposing them in the streets, in conversation, at the ballot box, in whatever way we can, and it’s up to God to forgive them for what they’re doing. Not us. I interpret God here, the Great Other as Rabbi Jamie sometimes says, as the collective us, our generation perhaps, or history. Or, perhaps, the very sensibility that inspires us to move into the breach on behalf of the vulnerable other.