Now past are shortest day and longest night, and with their passage returns the light.
Yes, I know the colonial world insists on calling this day the shortest and night the longest, but as usual, it’s entirely wrong. The moment of the solstice was at 3:02 AM local time today, which means that fall of dark will be that tiny fraction later tonight than it was last night. No, it won’t be perceptible to us, but it will be there all the same. By midnight, the markers of autumn were already hours past.
For us, this is both our winter solstice and the first hours of our new year. And no, you won’t find many others who mark it in this way, even among our own peoples, but we hew to an older tradition even in the face of colonial impositions of its structures on ways of reckoning season and time.
It’s a tradition that moves to the rhythms of the cosmos, to the melodies and harmonies of earth and sky, air and water, storm and light, and all the celestial masses and motions that inhabit deep space and hold our world on its axis and in its orbit. We find proof of these ways in the structures left by the ancestors, of observatories and charts and wheels and mounds, of the stories handed down to us since the dawn of time, no mere tales, these, but teachings of the most fundamental sort.
It is one of the gifts of this season, too, these still-long hours of cold and dark, when the power of elemental forces perforce keeps us indoors near the fire much longer than at other seasons. It grants us time for contemplation of such lessons, time that in warmer winds we convince ourselves we are too busy to afford. I say routinely that the real season of rebirth is not spring, but winter, and that is as true of our spirits as it is of the land outside the window: a time not only of being inside but of turning inward, a time of reflection and dreaming and the sort of deep thinking that leads us naturally to illumination, ur path lit by a visionary light.
Tonight, on this first night of our cosmos’s new year, there will more than just the sunset glow in the twilit sky. This is a once-every-800-years event: the Grand Conjunction that creates what, in a tradition newer than our own but still one backed now by some two thousand years of history, has come to be known as the “Christmas Star.” It’s actually a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, the planets at their closest in some eight centuries, so close, in fact, that to the mortal air they appear to be one, the brightest star in the sky. Tonight, it will appear near the waxing crescent moon, just as the last of the amber and copper and crimson fire fades from the western horizon.
Today’s image was captured nearly eight years ago now, on a new year’s night of the more commonly understood and accepted sort. Wings caught it, along with a series of like images, mere moments apart as the sun and the snow fell together. Since that moment, one one-hundredth of the time as the distance between Grand Conjunctions has now passed. Perhaps there is something in the rhythms of time that collaborates and conspires with numbers and repetitions to produce such otherworldly beacons on the cosmos’s own schedule. Perhaps it is more incidental, more accidental than that.
But tonight, just at dusk, we shall be out of doors, awaiting the setting of the sun and the rising of moon and stars, so that we may witness this gift that the universe has seen fit to deliver to our generation. And with it, we shall give thanks for the new year to come, for such visions and illumination as may come with it.
It all begins this night: solstice past; returns the light.
~ Aji
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