Quarter Day

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Some years it sneaks up on you.  The solstice, that is.  The weather remains an area of fascination for me, and not one of infrequent complaint.  The late spring (pretty much all of May and June up until Juneteenth) around here has been rainy and chilly.  Oh, we’ve had hot days sprinkled in, but even this week I had to wear a thermal shirt and fingerless gloves in the morning since there was no sun and the furnace has been off since last month.  The last couple of days, starting, ironically, at Valley Forge, have been getting hot.  And today begins astronomical summer.  I write about the seasons quite a lot.  Having been born and raised in a rainy, temperate zone climate, I grew up accustomed to four distinct seasons.  And we’re now at the longest day of the year.

The quarter days always make me reflective.  Culturally, there’s no real celebration associated with solstices or equinoxes.  The winter solstice falls relatively near Christmas and other winter holidays.  The spring equinox is close to Easter.  The start of summer, which should be ebulliently hopeful with its abundant sunshine, tends to get overlooked.  Some like to say summer is when life is easy.  It does mean mowing the lawn quite a bit.  The grass loves all the rain we’ve had this year.  Waypoints, however, are important.  We divide the year so we might anticipate.  Our agricultural roots focus on planting and harvest.  Even our hunter-gatherer forebears had to follow the food that changed location depending on the prevailing weather.  The seasons are deep within us.

The summer solstice always makes me think of Ari Aster’s Midsommar.  The underlying fear of too much light.  Even here there is a profound message for those able to excavate it.  If things are going well we tend to sabotage them.  Still, I prefer to think of this as a season of hope.  Summer illuminates.  I write this noting the sun’s chasing of twilight outside my window, even before five a.m.  There are still some clouds in the sky because old patterns are difficult to break.  But it is a season of light.  The next quarter day, when we start to realize that the darkness will be increasing until the sister solstice comes to our rescue in winter, is likewise passed over in silence.  By then many will be ready for a respite from the heat that comes with too much light.  Others of us will be thinking of cycles and how they are full of hope and anticipation.

Solstice 2024

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We have a small solstice celebration at home.  We’re not pagans, but it seems that the shortest day ought to be observed.  Noted.  Pondered.  You see, this holiday season had its earliest beginnings as solstice celebrations.  Fervently praying for more light, and a bit more warmth, ancient folk of the north knew to propitiate whatever powers that be in the dark.  “Please bring back our sun,” you can almost hear them sigh, in the bleak December.  I’m stunned and stilled by this each year.  The gradual change makes it less of a shock, but we’re living primarily in darkness now.  Until today.  The solstice is a turning point, an axis around which our lives turn.  Forgotten ancients celebrated it and eventually Christian and other holidays gathered around it, as if coming to a campfire on a cold night.  Why not stop a moment and reflect?

I’m a morning person.  More extreme than most other auroraphiliacs, I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t awake for sunrise.  Attempting to stay healthy, I try to get out for a morning jog before work, and that can be challenging for a guy who starts work early.  I sometimes start work even earlier than usual so that I can jog once the sun shyly glances over those eastern hills.  I notice the slow creep of the year.  At the other end of the day, it’s dark by the time work ends.  Mundane tasks such as hauling the garbage can out behind the garage can become tenebrous hikes.  Others who exercise, and work, most go to the gym.  I’ve tried jogging in the dark—it’s full of peril.  Like the ancient pagans, I look forward to a little more light.

Progress, like lasting change, must come slowly.  The earlier sun rises and later sunsets are first measured in matters of seconds, not minutes.  We remain in the dark even as we hope for light.  Hope pervades this time of year.  We anticipate Christmas, yes, but our light-starved eyes look beyond.  Beyond the chill of January into what some Celts marked as the start of spring—February.  Yes, the cold can be very intense then, but rages are always their most furious before they die out.  I suspect Dylan Thomas knew that when advising his dying father on how to approach the end.  I’m writing this post in the dark.  By dinner time the night will have already settled in.  And we’ll light a candle, encouraging more to join in looking for the elusive light.  Dawn always comes.  Eventually it comes.

Sun Day

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Two holidays in a row!  Although today nobody gets off work because, well, two holidays in a row is too much.  People might come to expect a little more time off.  If you’re like most people, the summer solstice creeps up on you.  Its more somber sibling, six months from now, is more anticipated.  In December we’re light deprived (here in the northern hemisphere) but we’ve been soaking in the sun for some time already now.  Besides, nobody gets the four turns of the year off work.  Christmas is a gimme, but it comes three or four days after the solstice.  We figure Labor Day is close enough the the autumnal equinox, and thank God Easter is a Sunday, at least in the years when it’s near the vernal equinox, so nobody complains.  I feel at my most pagan these days.  Why not celebrate the turning of the wheel?

The other day I was catching up on the Vlog Brothers—John and Hank Green.  Last week they were talking about “Beef Days,” or how to reduce the amount of red meat they eat.  They proposed doing it by setting aside a few holidays a year where they would have it.  Their reason?  The biggest environmental threat to our planet is our dependence on beef.  It’s the reason rainforests are being clear cut.  It is a huge source of greenhouse gasses.  The one thing they didn’t mention, however, is the suffering of the animals themselves.  Industrial farming leads to horrible lives being raised to be consumed.  The conditions in which animals are kept is so bad that it is illegal in some states to reveal the conditions to the public.  You hide things that you’re ashamed of.  I became a vegetarian a quarter century ago, and a vegan coming up on a decade now.   I can’t live being the cause of the suffering of others.

Why not use the ancient holidays as days of some kind of indulgence?  I don’t recommend eating red meat—in fact, I agree with my Edinburgh friend that if you want to eat meat you should be required to kill it yourself.  (He’s not a vegetarian, note, but a wise man.)  In any case, although you may be stuck behind a desk at work, take a moment to ponder that light will be slowly fading from this day on until we reach that other pole that turns another year.  And we can dream of shortened work weeks, although that’s about as likely as being given the summer solstice off as a matter of course.  Speaking of which, work calls.

Running out of Time

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How can you let a solstice slip past without noticing it?  Admittedly, it’s sometimes easy to do in summer, but for the winter solstice it’s more serious.  Ironically for me, the issue is that I’m still a jogger.  When you start your work day early, and you try to jog before work, the shortness of the day works against you.  Even if you prefer the after-work jog, December and January give you that perpetual feeling that you’re running out of time.  Each year around about now I look at charts.  Some organizations helpfully publish sunrise and sunset charts free on the internet.  I trace them to see when there will be enough light to jog in the morning.  Because of the offset between latest sunrise and earliest sunset, the evenings have been getting microscopically longer for a couple weeks now.  Sunrises, however, are still coming later.  They’ll continue to do so until about mid-January.

For those of us who parse out our days into minutes, trying to feed the beast that requires our utter devotion, finding time to jog can be difficult.  It’s dark after work, and besides, I’m exhausted and hungry by then and need to start on supper.  Morning’s an easier thing to control.  With pagan fervor I await the lengthening days.  Particularly the early mornings, which I crave to be earlier again.  So we light a Yule log and pray for the best.  Not that it ever changes sunrise times.  Around here there’ve been a couple of epic December rainstorms and cloudy days push available light back even further.  With the sun technically risen, it can still be dark.  There’s a metaphor here, dear reader.

Winters are for reflection.  Unless we’re busy cramming each day full of seasonal festivities, we spend a lot of time indoors with our thoughts.  That’s one of the reasons I jog.  It clears my head.  It’s the reboot that comes after the reboot of a night’s rest.  I’ve generally been awake for hours before sunrise.  These little thoughts I share with you daily are courtesy of those quiet moments in the dark.  A winter is wasted if we don’t use it for reflection.  Employers should be more generous with their December holidays.  It’s in sync with nature, which is more in keeping with being human than “business,” or “busyness” is.  Today is the winter solstice.  Around sunset we will light some candles of hope.  And we know that even if we can’t really tell, tomorrow will have a bit more light than today.

Dark v Light

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The summer solstice was days away and the earliest sunrise had already passed.  The earliest sunrise and the latest sunset are not on the same day.  To those of us who rise before the sun, it does make a difference.  I’m a morning jogger (when my back allows it).  I prefer to go out before work because otherwise you have to interrupt your day to put on your scuzzies and then come back all sweaty, hoping you didn’t forget about a meeting just after.  The thing is, I start work early and my preferred jogging time is around 5 a.m.  Back in May it’s easy to believe that this timetable is workable.  Then in August, almost like it’s pinned to the first of the month, you realize that it will be much closer to six than five before it’s light enough to see.  So the seasons go.

Even in the midst of a heat wave, you can smell autumn coming.  Yes, I know there will be hot days and uncomfortable nights yet.  But just as surely as Back to School merchandise begins to appear in July (school had been out maybe two weeks by then), fall inexorably follows summer.  Around here it’s been drier than normal.  Stressed trees began shedding leaves in July as if to say, “Alright, we’ll give this a try again next year.”  They are much more obvious about seasonal changes than the rest of us, but we’re all impacted by the always shifting patterns of light and warming, or cooling, mercury.  Seasons remind us of what it means to be mortal beings.  Melancholy isn’t always a bad thing.

Being a morning person, at least in my case, means spending quite a bit of my creative time in the dark.  In fact, back in June it’s like it gets light too soon for me to go jogging right away—I still have things to do first.  I also know it will still be some time before it’s dark when I go to bed.  I have no trouble sleeping in the light.  Our schedules are part of our perceptions of time and light.  We all agree, more of less, that from nine to five we’ll be at our desks, whiling away the most productive hours of sunlight.  I remember commuting to work in the dark only to commute home also in the dark.  Using that time for creativity is important, but so is trying to keep healthy.  Like the great dramatic acts of the solstices and equinoxes, it’s all a matter of balance.

All Things Being Equal

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Today the light and darkness are equal. The equinox is the great equalizer of the year, the day that reminds us summer’s ebullience is always, and ever will only be, temporary. From this day forth, for six months, night will dominate day. Religions the world over have offered responses to the increasing darkness. Autumnal festivals are among the most poignant as we can see the light diminishing, but we know nothing we can do will prevent it. Time alone cures this growing tenebrous atmosphere, until, as the solstice arrives, we dance, and sing, and drink, and burn candles to encourage the light to return. Return it does, on our universe’s ever rotating axis, bringing us around once again to when days lengthen and we turn our thoughts toward shallower things.

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The ember months, September, October (by association), November, December, each with an increasing sense of solemnity, invite us to read. Today begins Banned Book Week. I’ll be posting about banned books since, although my books deemed fit to print are so mundane as to offend no one, I stand in solidarity with any writer who has ever been told that her or his book is too violent, sexy, or depraved to be read. What thoughts are too dangerous to think? Religions will tell you, and so will pseudo-religions. Thoughts, however, are not so easily stopped. As an editor, I am a gatekeeper of sorts. Still, I know as an author that those I turn aside will persist. They will find their publishers. Their words will not be banned.

As an erstwhile writer I know that some of myself resides in each work clacked out on this keyboard. Those lucky enough to court editors with their efforts find the larger readerships. Some authors don’t even write their own books any more. Anyone can be imitated. The truly original, however, will always end up on someone’s banned book list. Our minds resist being challenged. We don’t want assumptions to be wrong. It’s too much work to have to think through all of this. It is easier to ban books than to have to try to comprehend them. As the darkness increases over the coming months, I will stockpile candles and light bulbs and huddle down next to a stack of books, secure in knowing that most of them have offended somebody along the way. And reading those books will only cause the light to grow.

Won’t Someone Think of the Gods?

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The annual holiday tradition of fighting over peace on earth has begun. It’s difficult to attribute blame since the “Keep Christ in Christmas” crowd do have a certain historical parsimony about them. Still, it was with tongue frozen in cheek that the Freedom From Religion Foundation put up a billboard in Pitman, New Jersey, with the message “Keep Saturn in Saturnalia.” Won’t someone think of the gods? In just the short span of my lifetime (well, half-a-century is really not that long) many assumptions about American religiosity have come to be questioned. There are those who seriously believe the Greco-Roman gods exist and they do have a right not to have their religion belittled. Those who find all religions laughable, I suppose, have the right to belittle. Some are devoted to Saturn. Others take seriously the Norse gods. Belief is like that—rationality is not a huge part of it.

Megyn Kelly, an anchor on Fox News, boldly declared this past week that Santa is, by dint of historical fact, white. I suspect she wasn’t thinking of Nicholas of Myra, but rather the jolly (white) man with glandular problems and the magical ability to visit every house in the world in a single night. The historical Saint Nicholas was born in Turkey. Kelly also made an unequivocal claim for Jesus’ whiteness, although he was clearly Semitic and historical records about him are extremely dicey. Conservatism, it seems, can only be pushed so far. I tend to think the problem is with making people into gods. Once a person becomes divine, in a monotheistic system—apart from all the theological casuistry than ensues—the nature of godhood is irrevocably associated with one race only. Of course Kelly, and many Fox News fans, have co-opted Christ from Judaism and suppose he was rather Nordic, as an article on CNN’s Belief Blog notes. Kind of like Thor, for what carpenter doesn’t know how to use a hammer?

To keep (white) Christ in (white) Christmas does betray a lack of familiarity with the Christmas story. Apart from angels appearing to some shepherds, the event was obscure—in the part of town across the tracks. Even the wisest men in the world had to stop and ask directions because they couldn’t find the place. The first Christmas, in as far as we can reconstruct it, was a silent affair with only the sounds of birth and the quiet desperation of a working class family far from home. No malls stayed open late that night.

The solstice is literally the darkest day of the year, the time when the slow return to light begins its weary trek over the next six months. We think of the cold, the dark, and hope for peace. No matter the holiday tradition, you’d think that peace would be one thing we could all agree upon. But gods are jealous beings, and, technically, they belong to no human race at all.

O holy night?

O holy night?

A Midsummer’s Daydream

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Solstices and equinoxes are among the earliest religious festivals in the world. While there is no means of proving this, the signs are fairly indicative; ancient peoples were close watchers of the sky. Like many other species of animals, they used subtle clues to help them determine which direction to go at what time of year. Once agriculture developed, the sky contained the key of when to plant and when to harvest and when to thank the gods. It is no surprise that when the classical religions developed many of their festivals centered around, especially, the equinoxes and the winter solstice. Did they even bother with the summer?

The summer solstice tends to get lost in most modern festive calendars: it is summer, a time when we are busy relaxing—the crops are in the ground, firewood need not be gathered just yet, and life is perhaps just a tiny bit easier (except for those poor kids who still have to finish out the school year!). No cause for wonder that this particular holiday (traditionally Midsummer) is most evident in northern Europe where in just six months days will be dreadfully short and very cold. Midsummer celebrates light, fertility, and healing. Some traditions claim that witches meet on Midsummer as the sun begins, once again, its inexorable journey south (from the northern hemisphere perspective) nearly to disappear in the dark December.

The modern day Midsummer celebration held by reconstructionist Neo-Pagans is Litha. The name is borrowed from the Venerable Bede but the observance of the solstice is certainly authentic. It is often celebrated with fires to shorten the already apocopated night. It is the time when darkness is at bay. It is perhaps telling that the major religions have little to add to days of relatively carefree existence. People need their religion when things go bad, but when the struggle is minimized we might leave angry gods behind for a while and just bask in the ease of it all. But, as the Neo-Pagans and witches know, the longest day of the year also foreshadows the darkness that, until this day next year, will never again allow us as much light.

Northern European Midsummer's bonfire

Inter-species Prognostication

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Groundhog Day is a holiday easily forgotten by all but Bill Murray fans and residents of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The day, however, has a role deep in European folk religion that was reflected in the “cross-quarter days.” From ancient times, the four days of the year that fall precisely between the solstices and equinoxes were known as cross-quarter days, based on the day of the month that rent was due in England (“quarter days”). The Celts recognized this cross-quarter day in early February as Imbolc (later Christianized as Candlemas). Part of the folk religion held that animals had special powers on cross-quarter days, and that fair weather on Imbolc meant that more wintry weather was on the way.

In America, where Groundhog Day has its original burrow, the tradition began among German immigrants. The first historical reference to Groundhog Day was made in 1841 in Morgantown, Pennsylvania. By 1886 Punxsutawney had its groundhog Phil and the tradition has continued ever since.

Although it is a lighthearted holiday, I always tell my Hebrew Prophets class (which begins near Groundhog Day) that this is a form of socially accepted prognostication. Few believe that a marmot can predict the weather, but we like to believe that winter is on its way out when the cold starts to feel old and stubborn and we are ready for a few sunny days. The old tradition states that if Phil doesn’t see his shadow he won’t dash fearfully into his den and spring is on its way. Fact is, spring falls six weeks from Groundhog Day, so no matter what the rodent says, spring is on its way. Ancient religions always stress the hope that nature will continue as it has in the past and that spring will follow winter as it should. It is nevertheless a fun day to watch the largest member of the squirrel family amble out of his heated burrow, no doubt confused by all the furless bipeds standing around with cameras, and play the prophet for his fifteen minutes of national fame.

The world's hairiest prophet?