Samain and the Gratitude Moon
Monday gratefuls: The Evergreen Chorale and their Season of Light concert at Colorado School of Mines. The Undertones, a choral group from Northwestern. The Denver Children’s Choir. The folks who built 470, 285, 6. The geology that built the Front Range. The snow last night. All the brave lights and the coming darkness.
Haven’t mentioned it much this year, but we’re in holiseason. The Evergreen Chorale’s holiday concert. The trees lit with colored lights up and down Black Mountain, Brook Forest Drive. The not-so quiet desperation of brick and mortar retailers. Dreidels and menorahs. We’ve passed through Samain (almost), dia de muertos, all souls, Thanksgiving, Divali, the Posada, most of Advent. Some big ones still ahead: the Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, New Years, Epiphany.
Here in the mid to northern latitudes the gradual lengthening of the darkness has created fear and some mad ideas. Like, daylight saving time, for example. Some of this fear has gone into each Christmas light, each Divali light, each menorah lit for the holidays. We want to say: We are human. We can fight the darkness. Beg Sol to return with sympathetic magic.
Here’s the thing though. We can’t fight the darkness. No matter how many bonfires we ignite, how many strings of lights we hang, how many courageous songs we sing to the many gods we hope will bring us out of the darkness, the Winter Solstice comes. Its darkness compels us to consider the so-far away apocalypse, the one we know is coming.
About a billion years from now Sol’s luminosity will have grown bright enough to boil our oceans and disperse our atmosphere. Well before our star expands into the red giant phase, much further along in its lifespan, Earth will no longer be inhabitable. This is the end, my friends, and the winter solstice reminds us of the forever darkness.
Will humanity have migrated far enough away to survive? Hard to say. Most of the sci-fi ship propulsion systems are very, very far from practical. Maybe we can get far enough away by hopping from home to home: Mars, then Enceladus, then ? Maybe not. Perhaps this strange, weird experiment, life, will wink out then, never to be repeated.
No Christmas lights, no Divali lamps, no menorah will save us then. Of course the personal apocalypse of each of us alive now will have long passed, so the Winter Solstice can remind us of that, too. We are temporary, fragile, unique, wonderful. Why can’t that be enough?
