Orion and me

I went for a run yesterday and it turned out to be the best run in recent history. The evening sky was completely black by the time I went at around seven, and it was so clear that the stars were stubbornly reaching out to this city dweller, for whom the airport to the southeast and downtown to the north usually obscure the rest of the galaxy. I was thinking about being more spontaneous in general and taking more risks, and then a suppressed elan du coeur expressed itself and I ran out into the lake. I couldn’t remember if the ice got thicker towards the middle of the lake or thinner, but I went for it anyways on fresh ice that had yet to be snowed upon, so it was slick as an ice rink. Had I fallen through, I might have thought, “So the Parcae spun.” In the middle of the lake I stopped for the first time to truly gaze at the stars, which refused to be ignored. I lay on my back on the frigid clear ice and let that old sense of wonder come back – the kind of awe that led me to plants and human bodies and rats and dinosaurs and all the other things I have ever been passionate about. I looked up at Orion and knew he would be around for billions of years after my death. I am an amalgam of matter imbued with a brief spark of consciousness, a tiny speck of thinking and knowing amidst this universe of mostly unconscious matter. Orion’s stars are just hunks of matter and yet they may give light and warmth to beings just like me, in a way coming to know itself. Then my ass and shoulders got cold and I had to get up and run back home. But still, this will stick with me.