Category: astronomical events

We made it, friends. After today the light returns, the calendar changes, and I think we can hope a little bit. Light a candle tonight, literally or metaphorically burn something you no longer want to carry, and plant the seeds for a better world.

Here is a poem by The Dark Is Rising author Susan Cooper for the shortest day today (and here’s an NPR interview with her and the illustrator of the book version of the poem).

The Shortest Day
by Susan Cooper

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.

They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.

And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us—listen!

All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

Saturday was the summer solstice and we went out to the Great Salt Lake to see it, as per tradition.

We met my brother’s family there and Skyler announced, several times, “I LOVE the Great Salt Lake!”  I do too. It still has dignity and calm, despite every thing that’s happened to it. (Maybe a solstice metaphor there?)

Yesterday was the spring equinox, the reaching of which always feels like a major accomplishment. As much as I try to think of the seasons as “not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return,” it’s hard to face six months of darkness. So the inverse–facing six months of sun and heat and long days–is really great. Even if it will probably snow a couple more times.

 

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. For the last month I’ve been feeling the S.A.D. creeping up and trying to fight it with light therapy, telling myself I can embrace the darkness and hibernate over Christmas. But after today, the fight should get a little easier and we’ll swing back into the real light, slowly but surely.

How should we celebrate? You can read that linked article above by Jeanette Winterson (still one of my favorites).  You can do any of these things if you’re a hippie or enjoy playing with fire. Or you can ponder this Roethke poem:

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood–
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks–is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is–
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

We’ve reached the fall equinox already and darkness is creeping in. As I get older (and more aware of SAD) I try to embrace this half of the year and not fight it–think candles, yarn, a car that can drive in the snow like a boss, a giant mood-lifting sun lamp at work, etc.

I think of this quote from Cold Mountain, too:

“Over time, watching [seasons change] again and again might make the years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return.”

The autumnal equinox is tonight, a point of balance in the year. You can get the science behind it here and the human rituals behind it here. And, as always, you can get your hippie on with the Mystic Mamma site:

Light and Dark, Life and Death, these are natural states in the continuum of all of Life. We cannot disconnect one from the other, and we can not deny that both are part of the whole of experience. We must see the beauty in both, the beauty in pain, the beauty in the struggle, the beauty in darkness of the night as well as the beauty in the light of day and the birth of the new emerging.

Looking back at the archives here and my life-long dread of the cold and dark, I realize I get mild Seasonal Affective Disorder every winter and the fall equinox marks the start of that. But March this year was also really hard for me, and when I read this post about the equinoxes and mental health, it all clicked. So I’m sharing it here along with the hippie thoughts. Just breathe. We can do this.

We made it out to the marina on the Great Salt Lake to watch the sunset on the solstice Saturday. The light was perfect:

What, don’t you wear long sweeping  dresses to your pagan-ish beach adventures? (Actually, we’d come from a wedding reception. At least I had sensible-ish shoes on.)

We met my brother and his family out there, too:

A good way to celebrate the fullness of the year.