By accident or need, we structure our lives with rituals that bring order to chaos and free our brains for the quaint musings that make us different from other animals. For the last five years, one of my rituals has been an evening walk with our dog, Lucy, usually around 9, and in our current season a clear night means walking in snow under a dome of blazing stars. We live at the end of a long dirt road with no traffic, and with the skunks and porcupines hunkered down on a cold night, Lucy and I go without a leash, my eyes to the sky and Lucy’s nose to the ground, both orienting ourselves to the mysteries of the universe. At this hour and this time of the year, Orion is what I see first — Orion, the amateur’s constellation, and impossible to miss as it wheels across the southern horizon.
Why is it that after so many decades on this earth that I still find pleasure in locating the three stars of Orion’s Belt and rotating him upright in my imagination so he can release an arrow from his bow? There are simple answers to this question — the expansive permanence of the universe next to my own mortality, or the bias toward ancient Greece at the foundation of my Western education — but I think something more idiosyncratic is at work in my head.
I like reading about the stars and listening to experts explain what I am missing when I stare in wonder at a brilliant sky. Every year I vow to learn more about the sky so that, without consulting charts, I can find more than Orion, the Pleiades, and the two dippers; but inevitably I fail at this task because somewhere in the process I lose interest. I think it has something to do with the scrawny bear or the lion that looks more like a flatiron than a cat that I end up with when I connect the dots of a constellation.
I also like reading about how different civilizations have given the same constellations their own names and stories, but the particulars of this rich cultural information soon escape my memory. When I look at the sky at night, the experience is personal: First, there is the breathtaking beauty that prompts me to turn off my headlamp for full effect, and th en the sense of wonder that follows soon after. I remember seeing Orion as a 17-year-old, walking back to my dorm at night after hockey practice, and what strikes me today is not that it is the same Orion I now see at night, but that it is the same me after these 57 years, despite all the changes I’ve undergone.
In contrast to my personal rumination, Lucy is all here and now as she picks up the scent of a fox or deer that recently crossed the road and disappeared into the thicket. Under a starry sky most people experience a version of the same archetype: that we are neither alone nor significant in the broad universe. Now, scientists who have used powerful telescopes to look far beyond our galaxy tell us with certainty that there other planets out there with atmospheres able to sustain life like Earth’s. It’s impossible to not wonder about possibilities when we look up at night. When my grandparents were teenagers, they saw the same Orion as I, as did the progenitors of our race roaming the planet with spears in search of meat.
But nothing lasts forever. I know that some of the pinpricks I see in the night sky are not stars but the light from dead stars already burnt to cinders, and in a certain mood, I infer that the energy I call renewable, generated by the solar panels on my house, come from a star that, too, will wink out one day. What am I to do with a realization like that? Luckily, there are more immediate perils to worry about. It used to be a family joke that global warming will one day transform our hilltop home into valuable shorefront property, but
now that we know more about the populations who will be swept away by rising seas even in the lifetime of our grandchildren, the joke has lost its savor.
How did my dog-walking thoughts turn so dark? I prefer the irony of being the same person I was at 17. I remember a time when my father worried that my love for sports was so far out of proportion that my mind would go soft, and I admit I gave him some reason to believe this. Then later, as a parent, I learned that although I had been unable to see the future that awaited my children, looking back decades later, I can see the coherent threads in their lives. Living my own life, I always sensed a loose coherence going forward from day to day (I even knew that sports were just for fun, and that one day I’d develop some more valuable skills); but it’s only in the last decade that looking back seems to be so much a part of going forward. Not in the Springsteen Glory Days sense, but I do wonder about paths my life might have taken and the reasons it didn’t.
Each night, Lucy and I turn around when we reach the same spot, an outcropping on the side of the road where in early summer, blood-red columbine pushes up through the thin soil that covers its top. In winter it is just a dark ledge in stark contrast to the snow, but still one of the most astonishingly beautiful spots on our land. I wonder if the farmer who sold these acres ever had the time to stop here as I do.
My dog knows the ritual. The biscuit she expects me to give her at the end of our walk stirs her dim thoughts, and she quickens her pace. When I turn around, I too am done with my musings. I may stop for a minute to take in the entire sky one last time, but thoughts of a comfortable bed and restful sleep have calmed my mind.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford.