Winter Solstice, 2019
On this gloomy morning I think back to an evening near the fall equinox in September when I sat on the porch in the twilight of what was still a summer day taking stock of the many signs of the coming change of season. Yes, it seems like twenty minutes, not three months, ago, but we won’t dwell on that. And now I sit here (inside) on the morning of the winter solstice, the most hopeful day of the year. The day when our seat on the Ferris wheel, after its long disheartening descent, reaches rock bottom and things can’t get any worse. From here on we are moving upward toward the light. As the days got depressingly shorter, it was even more depressing that they could get shorter yet, but now they can’t, and something in me over the following weeks will start to note the minutes we gain, though it’s usually February before I really feel it. That’s when things start to awaken and groggily decide they may as well have another go at life. New birds show up, the first daffodils, the suicidal Japanese magnolias, a smell you smell at no other time of the year, and it feels like there’s so much more space. More possibility. More hope. You just might make it. Merle Haggard was right—if we make it through December we’ll be fine.
It’s the time of year I like to look through the nursery catalogs. Aside from a few peppers, I don’t really garden anymore, so I won’t be ordering anything from those vegetable-porn publications, but it’s like people who read cookbooks just to read them—I just like to see those photographs of children holding award-winning butternut squash, and all the different kinds of corn and beans and walnut trees and delphiniums, and luxuriate in the idea of summer, without the inconvenience of actual summer. I richly experience what E. O. Wilson calls biophilia. Love of all life.
But I also love the cycle for being a cycle. In fact, all cycles. The secret thrill of change itself. Rhythm. Yin and yang. I love spring, but there’s no such thing without those hard cold days of January. Hope itself is part of a rhythm with despair. Fair needs foul.
I’m not sure if any thought went into the 23 1/2 degree tilt of our home planet on its axis, but whatever—thank you.
I have reached a point where my batteries need recharging. My brain and my eyes are tired. I think a handful of people actually read the reflections I put on this blog, and I am deeply grateful to you. But I don’t imagine you will really be disappointed to have one less thing to read for a while. When I started this blog I had stocked up a few of these posts, and today marks the fifty-sixth. I have really enjoyed writing them, but of late I’ve been feeling the grip of self-inflicted coercion on my throat, and I need a break. I would like to build up another little cache of whatever these things are, before I return to resume progress toward the state where I’ve said everything I have to say and retire. Hopefully not go beyond it. But it’s the time to reflect and work on some other matters that I really need. So I’m going to take a sabbatical, I’m not sure how long.
I also need a break from Facebook. There’s good stuff on there, and I enjoy staying in touch with friends, but it’s all starting to be very distracting for me. Like all times, the times we live in are addled, conflicted, and confused. For many of us, that conflict and confusion are our main entertainment. As usual, Zappa was right: “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
The climate is warming, and the world population is growing. These are our problems. Everything else is secondary.
Sometimes you just need to step back for a while, tune out the braying of popular culture, and try to find the springs of hope for humanity.
Love your neighbor.
December 21, 2019