Tonight will be the longest night of the year, the moment when Autumn finally passes its dimming torch to Winter.
It is also, as our peoples have always known, the day that marks a relengthening in the arc of Father Sun’s path, an almost-imperceptible increase, again, in the light itself.
In ancient times, this was a threshold of several sorts: not merely of the change of seasons, but of a new year, since, in ancient times untroubled by the artifice of an ecclesiastical calendar from half a world away, the shortest day of the year would have likewise marked its end.
It has always made far more sense to me to calculate the year in this way, and there is some deep hidden place in my soul that acknowledges tomorrow as the first day of the new year, even if it it not to be permitted to share in 2016’s accepted and “official” name.
The outside world cannot even agree on the date, needing to fit it neatly into boxes that comprise discrete 24-hour periods with midnights as their lines of demarcation. And so some mark today’s date as the Winter Solstice; others, tomorrow.
But the Solstice is more a more elemental thing. It will not be bound by human artifice; it arrives in its time, and departs similarly. This year, that time encompasses the hours between a little before 10 o’clock our time tonight and the same time tomorrow. The event begins in the whole dark of night, and whatever change occurs in the angle and force of the day’s light, either today or tomorrow, will exist beyond the perceptive powers of our weak sensibilities.
That perception will be further weakened on this day in this place, with the forecast altered suddenly from what was expected to be clear now to impending snow. At dawn, most of the land still slumbers beneath a soft gray blanket, clouds low around the horizon, shielding from view the peaks and ridgelines that serve as Father’s Sun’s point of entrance to our days. Bits of pale turquoise peek through to the west, but the darker violet blue of the winter storm drifts inexorably toward us, below and above it on all sides.
This evening, if we are fortunate, the veil in the western sky will part again, if briefly, allowing us to see Father Sun’s descent behind the trees and the mist of snow for one last time for this, the world’s actual, natural year.
As he makes his way down the short arc of twilight, Father Sun bestows a final gift upon his children before he retires to sleep again: the gift of the light, a thing we cannot touch, cannot hold, yet a thing that exists in spite of our inability to grasp it.
Silver to gold; gold to peach; peach to coral.
As night encroaches, the light intensifies in strength and shade alike, turning the things of this world, made by human hands and otherwise, into implements of mystery, artifacts of magic.
It’s tempting to see it as a last stand, as a defiant protest against the dark, but the light knows better than we that it is merely the orderly transfer of power for a few short hours. The light knows that it will return with the day, and with the change of season.
It is we who lack faith.
Others call it the return of the light, but that’s not quite right. They also refer to the period that culminates in this night as the dying of the light, but that is more wrong still, for the light does not die; it merely passes below the horizon of our own perception. We mortals have a tendency to announce the death of things we no longer see, be they the light or spirits, in defiance of faith and science alike. But it is less a matter of faith than an innate confidence in the way of the hoop itself: millennia of lived experience, of history and ancestral memory, assure us that everything will return again, including the light.
For today, as the glow shortens and shadows lengthen beneath lowering gray skies, we will watch for that magical moment just before sunset: that meeting between day and dusk in a final dance of the natural year, spiraling like the earth itself amidst whirling snowflakes, wrapped together in a blanket of red and gold light.
~ Aji
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