Winter Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice
Wondered if I was missing something. Turned on the radio to 99.5 and listened to Christmas music, classical variety. As I just to wrote to my brother and sister, there is some residual Methodist wandering around in my head, recalling those nights in the church on John Street, candles winking out as congregants extinguished them, leaving the sanctuary in darkness, a voice, in this particular instance, a voice from the Metropolitan Opera, a hometown gal who’d made it big in the big city, singing out of that darkness, O Holy Night. Still sends shivers up my spine.
There is, too, a small boy waiting for Santa Claus and the luster of mid-day on objects below. He misses the Christmas tree and the presents and the music. And family. Perhaps most of all family.
These both are, however, voices from my past, valued and warmly received when they emerge, but no longer vital in my present, just as the music of the 60’s or the cars of the 50’s still recall a good time, an important time, but a time now gone by.
I pressed the cd button and returned to the lectures on Big History, this time a review of the paleolithic, a historical era critical for our species, but often overlooked. In this time we migrated first to the southern rim of Asia, then across the waters to Australia, and through Asia, across the land bridge to North America. Each one of these migrations a test for our new specie’s capacity for collective learning, each one requiring a new set of skills, new tricks to wring energy and resources out of a new environment. These were tests we passed and in that passing set the stage for our current dominance of the earth’s biosphere.
Christmastime and the Christmas spirit no longer enfolds me as it once did, sweeping down after thanksgiving and placing me in the confusing mix of retail extravaganza and high religious celebration. Now the Solstice carries some of that numinosity for me, but none of the commercial buzz. I don’t miss the maw of gifts and money and credit, false gods if ever there were ones. Quiet, calm, still. Dark, meditative, inward. That’s the reason for the season for me now.
So, I’m glad for a place of peace as the Christmas machine churns anxiously all around me. Still into the incarnation though.
