For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by Orion’s belt. Since it always points to the sunrise those stars were the most obvious ones for me to refer to. Polaris and its axis was a given because of Christmas and Midsummer’s Eve. The polar night and the midnight sun. It has always been related to creation, to consciousness as a separation, and existence itself. Of corporeal belonging. But Orion’s belt was also up there, I registered it in the evenings, nights and early mornings without really thinking anything further about it. So one night it struck me after I pointed out its significance for my grandson. They are the ailekes-olmak, the three Sami celestial beings who always herald the sun, the arrival of light. Out of respect for them, for what they were, in traditional time they were noticed for three days, ending with Sunday, the day of the sun. In this way, the sun, the light, the light of consciousness were connected with warmth, energy, spontaneously obtained understanding, and the constantly recurring flow of life in a way that makes us feel directly involved in it. It was never about the composition of the stars. About the details of the sun and the photosynthesis. Just about day and night. About psychic sleep, and it’s relation to our living conditions. We know through them when the great darkness dissipates, when the return of the light and the world emerges from the unknown. From the great bottomless depths of the cosmic night. Something that city life, artificial climate, street lighting, sidewalks and paved roads obscure for us. We tend to forget the connection we have to the fact that the night sky orbits the North Star axis*, as much as we orbit the sun, that the sun moves to its highest and lowest position over the course of a year. That is, the winter and summer solstice. It is the sun that creates our light in the cosmic night. In the vast space of the unknown and in our unconscious sleep. The celestial objects we can see in the bottomless depths from which everything arises also point to patterns that have practical consequences for us if we consciously pay attention to them. Consciousness is our dawn, the light our psychic reflection creates from the impact it have on us. Without the sun, we would be eternally engulfed by the cosmic night. To psychic sleep. That is why we are the people of the sun.
My grandson expressed this in a child’s unconditional way when we talked about the night sky last winter, when we where lying in the snow and I asked him about what he thought was out there? ” -Everything I do not know”, was his immediate and lightning fast answer.
*Where I come from, the north of Sweden.