October 2011 Archives

Well, hello there. I haven't blogged in months, because I haven't had much to say. (You're welcome.) I've been quiet in part because I lost a friend a while back, and to the extent possible I dropped out of life for a while.

If you live long enough, you learn that grief leaches away slowly, day by day, at a pace of its own choosing. You wake up in the small hours, think about things, decide you're not going to be able to go back to sleep, and go down and make coffee, pretending as if you were getting up to go fishing or something. That's what I did this morning. And it was trash day, so I took the recycling bin out to the curb, and I looked up for a moment, and saw Orion. There was no moon out, and the stars shone brightly, and I stood there for quite some time. Then I went in, put on more coffee, and went upstairs for a book I hadn't looked at in years—a book about the constellations.

I opened the book to the appropriate chart for the time and season, and started going back and forth—outside to gaze at the stars, looking for patterns, then back in to pore over the chart. Until last night I only knew three constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Pleiades. But somehow, this morning the stars began to tell me their names. That star to the east of Orion's foot was Procyon, part of Canis Minor, and upwards from it were Castor and Pollux, part of Gemini. There was Regulus, there was Aldebaran, and over there to the west, Jupiter was blazing in Aries.

The writer T.H. White once said that one of the best remedies for sorrow is to learn something new. I learned something new this morning, and I want to build on that. If I wake up sad again, I'll go out and look at the stars, learning new ones, building on what I've learned before. Besides, I think another remedy for sadness is to see the big picture. It doesn't restore any particular thing you've lost, but looking at the big picture can sometimes give you some peace, I've found. And there's no bigger picture than the night sky.