Each morning, before sunrise, I walk out to the end of the estate’s drive way to pick up the newspaper, and can never resist looking up at the pre-dawn sky as I walk back to the house. Since my walk is nearly always at the same time I am afforded the opportunity of calculating the movement of the seasons by the shift of the placement of stars nearly discernable from day to day, certainly discernable week to week.
When the first entry was written here Orion ruled the night sky and Scorpio crept up and across the sky, undetected, in the bright winter daylight. Now, a half a year later, as I lie down to sleep, I look out my window and watch Scorpio, now bold in the dark of the night, marching with the steady pace of all constellations slowly across the black canvas towards the west.
This morning, returning from the walk down the drive, I looked up and then over to the east, over the top of the tallest magnolia on the estate, and saw a partial Orion over the treetops. I imagined the hunter at the end of the hunt, becoming slowly visible, walking over the hilltops, returning home with food and perhaps more than one story.
The world turns again and again and continuously.
Each of these sky opposites hold past days of my own, and they will release one image of one yesterday each time I see them. Even if I see those bright stars on one night after another, or in the morning of every day of the week, each time I look up I look back and remember a face, I think I hear a voice, I know I recall a feeling.
These permanent points of light have been trusted by mariners, both ancient and astro, to determine place whether sailing the surface of the Earth on a sea or on the outer surfaces of the Earth’s air in the edge of space. I too look up and beyond and check my course, this route I have chosen and continue to choose each day.