It’s the Best Time of the Year

Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

Sunday gratefuls: Mark working his options. Mary. Turning cold and Snowy for Thanksgiving week. Thanksgiving at the Water Grill. Nexus, chilling and hopeful about A.I. Constitutional A.I. Anthropic’s Claude. ChatbotGPT. A.I.’s policing each other. Living. Cancer. Stable. Long tie guys quick appointments. Loyalty far and above competence.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Love

Kavannah: Perseverance

One brief shining: The coffee slides down my throat, the heavy mug with the Elk and the logo Evergreen reminds me of my current location as the caffeine hits my bloodstream and sleep begins to fall away, replaced by alertness, keystrokes and thoughts once again merge, another morning of Ancientrails under construction.

 

Hitting the family Ellis in their various locations: Melbourne, K.L., Songtan. All from the top of Shadow Mountain. Thanksgiving week. Holiseason well underway. Diwali. Thanksgiving. Advent. Yule. Christmas. Hanukah. Kwanza.

It’s that time of the year. My favorite. I love the lights, the music, the cheerfulness, the gatherings. The opportunity to celebrate life connections, to go deep into the psyche hunting for ohr, the light of creation. We’ve already had Divali and Samain both of which shared the same Gregorian dates this year. All Saints. Now Thanksgiving.

I appreciate the layered ironies of all holidays. Light against the fading of Great Sol. The depth of learning available only in the darkness. The messy and ugly origins of Thanksgiving, yet its warmth and family focus now. Our need to see Native American stories. Christmas replacing the Roman blowout of Saturnalia with its too often ridiculous capitalist captivity. Hanukah and its noble martyrs who were far right Jews of their time and its gentler but still ridiculous capitalist captivity. Yule, its symbols taken over: The Christmas Tree. The Evergreen Holly and Ivy. The crackling Fire with the Yule Log. A wassail bowl. Singing and Feasting. Cultural appropriation of long ago.

So much to appreciate, to probe.

Then, less than a month from now, the least encumbered holiday of them all, the Winter Solstice. A celebration of life continuing in the darkest moments. The rich nurturing of nighttime, of a blanket of Snow, a bright Moon. The psyche free to roam in the oceans of the unconscious. A still turning point. Join me on that long night. Unless of course you live in the Southern Hemisphere where you’ll get naked and dance around the bonfires of the Summer Solstice. Looking at you, Australia. New Zealand. Africa. Most of Latin America.

 

Just a moment: Reminded by all of the Thanksgiving recipes of my first attempt to cook a Thanksgiving meal. In my senior year of college, 1968-69, I worked as an 11 to 7 security guard at a factory that made magnalite cookware. For the Thanksgiving holiday they gave all employees a frozen Turkey.

I dutifully took it home and put it in the freezer of the second story apartment I shared with John Belcher and Carter Fox. On Thanksgiving day I took it out and called my Aunt Marjorie to ask her what to do. She was a professional cook for the University.

Imagine her surprise when I led with, “I have this frozen Turkey. What do I do with it?”

As you could guess, my roommates and I went out for our Thanksgiving meal.