It's that time of month again

My days have gotten pretty busy, so dog walking has started to become a nocturnal affair. After a seemingly endless series of cloudy nights, the air last night was crisp and the sky clear. The dogs and I turned out our of our yard and headed up the hill. As we came out from under the canopy of trees I caught a glimpse of the quarter moon, and was then struck by my curse.

Did I ever mention I was cursed? It doesn't often come up in conversation. It's not a serious curse, of the "condemned to walk undead through the churning mists of time" variety -- one might be better off thinking of it as a "persistent self-refreshing meme" that I happened to catch thirty-some years ago, and have been unable to shake ever since.

The curse was put upon me during my first job after college by Marty, the guy I worked for. He was the founder of a "New Age Video Art" collective, which as I later learned from other examples appeared to be built upon a fairly rigid social model. There was the "head", the "artist" (in those days, always another guy), "the girlfriend" (of either the head or the artist), and the "tech geek". Guess which one I was?

Anyhow, after graduating college Marty was out in the Vermont woods, dropped some acid, and happened to look at the sky just as a Meteor streaked across the constellation of Orion. The moment burned itself into his memory, to the extent that it became a fundamental metaphor in his life, and a tale he told to everyone he met. "In that moment, a connection appeared between the stars in Orion, the meteor that for one instant burst into light, and one person on the ground in the middle of the woods. That moment never happened before and will never happen exactly in that way again." He'd then end the story with the fateful words "Remember that....whenever you look up at the night sky, the first thing you'll see will be Orion, and you'll remember."

It's been thirty two years and that meme has still caught me. If it's winter time, at night, and I chance to look at a clear patch of sky, I will always find myself staring at Orion, and I will think of that long ago conversation with a guy who never quite got around to paying us, working for a company that never quite got launched on the path to success. Yes, I know that Orion is a pretty obvious constellation, easily spotted in a North American winter sky. But, it's equally true that there are connections that occur in our lives, seemingly random but somehow significant. Marty and I were in a particular place at the same time, and in some way our association influenced what job I took next, and so forth down a chain that eventually leads to "me", in today's here and now.

Life almost inevitably is a twisty path we walk. Few of us live lives of certainty, with our futures exactly matching the visions of our youth. Instead, we find ourself making a series of small and large choices that take us more or less in a certain direction, sometimes marching forward in leaps and bounds, sometimes veering into heartbreaking setbacks and reverses. Often, we strive for goals that seemingly are aways just beyond our reach, which appear to dodge out of our grasp despite every effort we make. On other occasions, our lives appear intertwined with people, places, and events that seem inevitable, our paths meeting theirs despite any choice we might have made or alternate direction we might have taken.

So that's my curse. Orion in a winter's sky, and an hour spent musing on days long gone and pondering whether the sisters of Fate still spin, stretch, and cut the threads of our lives. And presuming they do, perhaps we should acknowledge them with a few moments of silent thanks for those interwoven threads that strengthen ours, and rememberence of the ones that frayed too soon and broke too quickly.