Orion the Hunter

Four days after leaving home and my parents, I have arrived in Toronto. It is reasonably warm, around 30, with snow flurries. Big puffy snow flurries. I stand at the window and watch as the ground turns from grey to white.

Five hours ago, I was sitting on a stranger’s desk in a cubicle in the Canadian Immigration Office in the Toronto airport, crying on the phone with my mother. They won’t let me in the country.

Ten hours previous, I was in the guest room of a flat in Chicago, frantically unpacking and re-packing my suitcases, trying to determine what needed to go right away and what could wait awhile to be reunited with me. At 2 AM, I rest my head on a puffy vest and sigh.

Two days before this I was in the air somewhere over Nebraska. I had watched the sun go down over Colorado, the vermillion cliffs offset by blinding snow, the final glimmers of daylight illuminating the peaks of the Rockies. As we fly further east, the sky ahead grows darker, the lights below more sparse, until one magic moment when the horizon is no longer, and the lights of tiny towns on the plains and the glimmer of far distant constellations are interchangeable reflections of each other. In the quiet cabin with my face pressed against the window, I see the web of humanity, islands of lights floating in a dark sea like inflorescences of algal blooms at red tide, glowing filaments strung delicately between, silk threads with tenuous holds on their seemingly transient anchors.

Fixing my attention once again on the stars, I see Orion the Hunter. This is no surprise – he has long been the only winter constellation I recognize readily. This night he seemed to be more than just a familiar face, though, as the mythology of the constellation crept back into my consciousness. Orion, the hunter, won wide renown for his great beauty and hunting skills. And as would be natural, he believed every bit of it, to the point of boasting publicly (and at length) about his superiority over all creatures on earth. Anyone familiar with Greek mythology will not be surprised by what happens next: the easily annoyed gods decide to punish Orion for his arrogance by sending a scorpion to kill him (through a sting to the foot). And thus was the proud and boastful Orion felled by the lowly scorpion.

As for his position in the night sky, that is the doing of his long-time admirer Diana, who asked that his image be writ in the stars as an homage. And though often cruel, the gods respected his final wishes to never be near the scorpion again by placing him opposite scorpio, so that they never would share the night sky.

In accordance with the poetic turn my psyche has taken in the past few weeks, this usually insignificant noticing of a familiar constellation has stayed with me, has sat with my thoughts, retreating just long enough for me to forget before it resurfaces, demanding my attention once more. While I do not claim to be an Orion in any sense (I am most definitely a very poor hunter) it seems to me that the lessons imposed upon him are in many ways being imposed on me. Just when I begin to feel confident enough to become careless, the gods send me my scorpion (which has lately been in the form of huge government bureaucracies) and I end up in tears in a stranger’s cubicle in the Canadian Immigration Centre at the Toronto airport.

But I thank the gods for my own team of Dianas, who are my advocates, supporters, and reality checks, who tolerate my major and minor breakdowns with great grace and love, but who, unlike the Diana of myth, redirect my misguided wanderings and keep my feet free from as many scorpions as possible.

So here I am today, in a cozy apartment, with the TV on low, drained but not defeated. I hope that I have begun to learn some lessons, to know how to plan ahead even when my entire being resists.

Tomorrow is a new day, filled with college football and Suczynskis. It is sure to break the trend of “philosophical posts….”