Orion Spring 2024

PROBABLY this couldn’t be true, but I do remember quite clearly those afternoons when my father would hand me a stack of his students’ blue books and watch television sports while I read through the papers. As a teenager, I never understood the purpose of the ritual, but I was better for it, brought closer to him in body and mind by those powder blue notebooks and the blood-red markup they contained. Some-times, when his writing wasn’t clear, I’d find myself tracing over it, parsing the contours of his language. Sometimes, after he’d fall asleep on the sofa, I’d add an encouraging note in his handwriting at the end and replace the book in the stack, wishing that my words might be mistaken for his, that on paper I might…

IN MODERN secular societies, religion is often considered antiquated and its traditions a fossil of benighted people dwelling in a medieval worldview, lost in reveries of salvation. Some look down on piety as primitive, and ritual practices as childlike. Certainly secular academia avoids religion and eschews the scent of spirituality. Ethics are allowed inside the ivy walls, but anything that smacks of faith or belief is left on the steps of the divinity schools. Our siloed rationalized disciplines are enough to contain all the “truth” that is needed. A life of meaning or purpose? Perhaps the philosophy or religion departments can attend to that. Yet, can we imagine our lives without rituals? Most of us have daily rituals—as simple as our morning coffee or afternoon tea. Many of us measure…

DADIMA PRACTICES yoga every day. She had been studying abroad in London and just returned to India when she began her practice, around the same time she married a naval officer. His mother suggested she drop out of college after the wedding, which she did. That was the year her first son was born, soon followed by her second, my father. Each of these days, Dadima did yoga. When she left Bombay in 1980 to go to Colorado while her husband stayed behind shipping butchered sheep to the Middle East, she practiced. While she raised two teen-age boys in a white town in a red state, she practiced. When the cold winters alone grew dark and heavy and she longed for home, she returned to the large rug in her…

WE WERE YOUNG and eager river guides, and every spring after the winter rains, my friends and I traveled to the foothills of Northern California to scout the rivers. All around, flaming crimson Indian paintbrush bloomed, and the chattering of bank swallows and coos of mourning doves filled the air. In the evenings, tired and content, we gathered round a campfire to share the poetry and stories of our favorite writers. The fire crackled and a soft darkness enveloped us in a snug cocoon. That’s when I first heard—over forty years ago—words from the Song of Songs. “Get up my beloved … Come away! /For now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. /The scarlet blossoms have appeared in the land, the time of the songbird has…

“IT WANTS TO BE WINDY,”Papa would say of Sila, the weather. “It likes to be cold,” he’d say in December when the Monitor heater in Papa and Gram’s home ran nonstop, the temperature at -40 to -50 degrees Fahrenheit for days. Sila is alive, his words told me. Sila has a spirit. She, after all, decides the actions of our days. Papa respected the weather. The slight, strong, sinewy man, in his scratchy, wool checkered shirts, would walk from his house to stand at the sandy beach and look out onto the ocean at the western sky. He’d accurately forecast what Sila would do for the days, the week ahead. He knew her signs. Her moods. Her desires. From the shape of the clouds. The color of the water. The…

MY NOTES from the summer I spent in Samsø, Denmark, are mostly about its picturesque beauty. The island appears untouched by human hands—all windswept hills, silent beaches, shallows filled with languid purplish jellyfish waiting to be pulled back out to sea. The villages that populated it in the Viking Age have been swallowed whole by the land on which they once stood. The only things to have evaded the open mouth of the earth are scattered stone dolmens and passage graves—monuments too big, I suppose, to be metabolized in a mere thousand years. Gone are the days when Samsø served as an important Viking meeting place. Today nature has reclaimed the island; no one can even reconstruct the etymology of its name. I was on Samsø to help excavate the…