Solstice
It’s here, the shortest day of the longest year, the day when things turn around. No, not New Years Day, but rather the day that our planet’s tilted just so, spinning, revolving, existing, and creating the experience of winter solstice. It’s the day the sun stands still for a moment before reversing course. The day the earth travels furthest from the sun, during a season when some say the heavens come closest. We tend to complain about this time of year, about daylight savings, about how early it gets dark in the evenings and how we shouldn’t be changing the clocks at all, ever.
“We’re not all farmers any longer,” the argument. “Why can’t we be like Arizona,” some say.
New Year Day is a fabrication, a function on a calendar created by humans to keep track of time and our sanity. The solstice something altogether different, irrefutable, existing for all living creatures, experienced by all, regardless of intelligence, the day everything reverses without changing a thing. The earth still spinning clockwise around a sun that some say will burnout in a trillion years, a blip in galaxy that features thousands of stars just as big and bright as our own.
People tend to get more excited about the solstice in summer than in winter. Not me. This one holds the promise of longer days, of the coming of spring, of days when I will again bike home from work in the light. No, I love that the winter solstice lands exactly when it does, before the commercialism of Christmas wipes out the cosmic relevance of the day, before people get lost in resolutions, before we lose sight of the universal appeal of something as simple as the tilt of the earth, and with it the changing nature of sunlight, of daytime, of waking hours. The solstice sneaks in with a whisper, noticed by few, celebrated by fewer. Pliny wrote about it. Some calendars consider the solstice the height of each season, not the beginning — midsummer — made famous by Shakespeare.
This year December 21st takes on epochal meaning, aligning with a Christmas Star sighting, and falling almost to the day when our country starts vaccinating a population. And while I might be some 3,500,230th on the inoculation list, the countdown for each of us begins in earnest, countdown to herd immunity, to a time when we will look back and wonder how we got through it.
On March 13th, the day we locked down, just a week before the equinox and first day of spring, we caught ourselves saying it would be a month, maybe two, before we returned to our lives. Did Dr. Fauci know then that it would be a year? That we’d flaunt the guidelines, politicize the masks, and fail to properly distance? I can’t shake the image of our President ripping his mask off after a three-day COVID emergency hospital stay. Did the epidemiologists hold back on the truth because they didn’t want us to panic? What does panic look like when you’re not allowed to leave the house?
Winter solstice means the earth’s traveled to its furthest distance from the sun as we travel further and further from what used to be. Has this pandemic raged to its coldest day, with millions infected, and thousands still entering hospitals? Might we too turn the corner now, and start reversing the trend of infection, moving closer and closer to when we might say it’s behind us? Let’s hope.
· I commit this blog to the power of possibility as we push the darkness back, each day a few minutes at a time.
· I write with the sole intent of reveling in a spirit of inspiration, taking a page from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic.
· I write this blog because I love the connections I have with you, the reader, wherever and whoever you are.
