I was wandering happily through Cardiff the other day, when I saw Orion in the sky and pointed it out to my boy excitedly. He said that it was just a bunch of dots and that it looks nothing like a man, and of course he's right... but this is sort of not the point.
Think of stars themselves. The Thing is: a star. A ball of gas burning billions of miles away (ten points for quote-spotting). But the idea of the thing is "like a diamond in the sky", a small twinkling jewel that children make wishes on.
There's a huge gap between what something actually is, and what the idea of it is.
So yeah, Orion is technically a bunch of dots, or literally several balls of flaming gas, but it's more than that to me. It's a legend about a hunter immortalised in the skies; it's a symbol of my slightly superstitious tendencies; it's a reminder that God's still there and hasn't left me alone. And it's just pretty.
