We’ve had a cold spell recently, and it’s been below zero every night. During the work-week I experience the cold rather fully: not only because I work a great deal outdoors, but because with my small stove my house is cold when I am away. I came back from the city late Monday night, and it was seven degrees inside my cabin; I had to stay up a few hours with my stove warming the house up to about thirty, when I went to sleep. The next evening, coming home from the wind-turbine meeting late at night (around nine p.m.) it was eleven degrees inside the cabin, and, astonishingly, that felt warm to my skin: it was at least ten degrees colder outside even then. I like living with the cold – I do not want to homogenize life into modernity: when it is summer let me work in the sun and dirt, and drip with my own sweat, and then jump into the creek; when it is raining I want to be soaked and stand out in the rain all day like an old tree; when it is winter I want to feel the knife-air on my raw skin, and dance with joy and gratitude before a glowing stove at night. And to live this way is more than just pleasing contrast and fullness of experience (which it is): it is also living in accord with nature, living on less, and the kind of life we will have to have if we are to live sustainably. We cannot make summers cool and winters warm without cost. Everything will be paid for. Everything. “Amen, I say to you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.”
Last weekend I was teaching for a Latin immersion experience in West Virginia and the first night there I saw what I had never seen before down South: a sky of stars (a Southerner confessed to me that because of the humidity he never sees stars like the stars of the North). I brushed up on my mythology – just the story of Orion, really – and led a group of skywatchers out into the field and spoke to them about the constellations, in Latin. It was for me a visible, tangible, sacramental experience of a connection with the past: to watch and talk about the stars in a language that has been used for such discussions for literally thousands of years.
Everyone knows the constellation Orion, but very few know his myth, in part because his story has received no particularly complete or deathless treatment in what we have of the literature of the ancient world. But the important part of the story, to me, was the hubris of his death: Orion the great hunter, inflated with his success, decides to kill every animal on Earth. Earth, or Artemis (depending on the version, but the name matters not – the female Earth-principle) sends, as punishment, the Scorpion to kill him.
To the ancients this may not have even seemed like a terribly significant myth: it was not conceivable that a man should kill off the animals of the Earth. And of course even for us this is not possible without, as the myth indicates, our own death. This is the story our culture has written into the winter sky. And even in the city, this one constellation, and this one lesson, is visible.
Up here it is clear as crystal. In fact last night was the best display of stars I have ever seen in the Catskills. It was clear and cold and amazing. I stood outside and looked at my little cabin, dark in the white snow, stars everywhere all around it, and was amazed.
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