Adaptation

These Aster stalks and the snow and the darkness combined as an image of the final day of fall. Here, even the heartiest plants have fallen dormant, nights stretching for more than sixteen hours, frigid winds and desiccated air. I only see crows and pigeons and an occassional flock of sparrows. The song birds have gone south. Our neighborhood skunk left last year after the removal of poison ivy and has not returned. The squirrels do not even venture out very often, sleeping the day away. This deepest chasm of darkness, the tilt of the Earth against us, the life giving sun skipping most rays across our day at too steep an angle to hold firm. I look into a five thirty a.m. summer sun at eight thirty a.m. here in the final hours before the longest night. The season of declining light may not bother everyone, but it has never sat well with me. An unconscious reaction, a sullenness, always overtakes me through the waning days of November and December. I see the husks of plants long dead, the empty branches of dormant trees, I hear the hollow crunch of frozen ground, all through the half-light of a sun that seems to be leaving us. And then into tonight, the solstice, the longest night of the year, past the border, the nadir, the farthest lean; the luminous year is re-born this evening, the resurrection of the sun begins. Slowly through the next days and weeks the truth will become obvious, we will feel it in our bones, we will sense it in our spirits, a new year is upon us. New opportunities, new hopes, a growing of light across the land. For me then, not calendars, nor holy-days of human scripture, but this patterned end of darkening and renewal of light, the gift of orbit that contributes to all of life's motions, this is the moment that we can share a sense of gratitude that extends universally, that puts us outside ourselves and into rhythms that have lasted eons. Promises fulfilled again and again and again. Life in evolution. Gracias al universo por todo.

It is alway too soon to tell, but murmurs suggest that along with this renewal of season, the arrival of winter also brings a dissembling of authority taken without due process nor legal justification. A strange tenor of fortitude echoes from the mouths of lawmen long since mute. More face time, more desperation. His case has no standing, even if he can score rhetorical points with the faithful. The longer days do not bode well for an administration cloked in darkness. But only time can really know where this will lead. In the meantime, my new year wishes: May our next full orbit be more peaceful than our last. May sense overcome the senselessness now dominant in cultural and social life. May we all find our necessary and comfortable places with frequency throughout the year. If your path is just and true and your conscience is clean, I wish you continued success in the seasons ahead. To the rest, I wish enlightened change and genuine inner peace before your time has passed. May we all adapt as time requests.