• Tag Archives solstice

  • Solstice Celebrations. What Might They Mean?

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Winter                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Something new seems to be happening.  Not sure if I’m reading the rustling in the ether of our culture right, but it feels like the Great Wheel may have begun to reemerge.  Not in a Wiccan or alt-pagan way, though that’s certainly there, but in a from the ground up way (so to speak).

    A friend called me tonight to wish me a salubrious solstice.  Kate wants to do a fire tonight. First Universalist has a solstice celebration as do many UU congregations.  There has been, for a while now, solstice celebrations on the continent.  I’m most familiar with ones in Scotland and Sweden.

    These celebrations, rituals whatever we might call them are not confined to the Winter Solstice though the spreading knowledge of Christmas’s relationship to the Saturnalia, itself a winter solstice holiday, has given the Winter Solstice a cultural leg up, as has a more general appreciation for the other festivals of light around this time:  Deepavali, Hanukkah, Christmas trees and home decorating–neither one of which has any obvious link with the Christian holiday.

    I don’t know quite how to go about measuring the cultural penetration of solstice and equinox awareness, or the depth of its relation to individual’s religious yearnings, but my own sensibilities suggest the penetration has gone far past the surface and has, for some folks, like myself, reached the point of religious sentiment.

    The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in a somewhat ham-fisted way, changed its holiday traditions focus from a sort of Victorian dress up for Christmas to what is now called a Winter Lights celebration.

    I’d be interested to know what you think, what you see from your standpoint.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work Holidays Humanities Myth and Story 📎and tagged

  • The Value of Increasing Darkness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                         Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    The daylight is gone, twilight has fallen and night is on its way.  Now that we have entered the season of Samhain, the leaves have vanished from the trees and the clouds, like tonight, often hang gray in the sky.  Samhain means the end of summer and in the old Celtic calendar was the half of the year when the fields went fallow while the temperature turned cool, then cold, hope returning around the first of February, Imbolc, when the ewes would freshen and milk would once again be part of the diet as new life promised spring.

    In between Imbolc and Samhain lies the Winter Solstice.  The early darkness presages the long twilight; it lasts from now until late December as we move into the increasing night until daylight becomes only a third of the day.  This has been, for many years, my favorite time of year.  I like the brave festivals when lights show up on homes and music whirs up, making us all hope we can dance away our fear.

    The Yamatanka mandala at the Minnesota Institute of Art gives a meditator in the Tantric disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism a cosmic map, brightly displaying the way to Yamatanka’s palace grounds.  In the middle of the palace grounds, represented here by a blue field with a vajra (sacred thunderbolt) Yamantaka awaits our presence.

    In the Great Wheel as I have come to know it, we visit Yamantaka on the night of the Winter Solstice, that extended darkness that gives us a foretaste of death.  Our death.  On that night we can sit with ourselves, calm and quiet, imagining our body laid out on a bed, eyes closed, mouth quiet, a peaceful expression on our lifeless face.

    We can do that, not in suicidal fantasy, but in recognition of our mortality, our finite time upon the wheel of life, awaiting our turn as the wheel turns under the heavens carrying us away from this veil of samsara.  If we can do that, we can then open ourselves to the thin sliver of light that becomes more and more, as the solstice marks the turning back of the darkness and brings us once again to life.

    When we can visit Yamantaka’s palace, sup with him in this throne room and see death as he, the conqueror of death sees it, we are finally free.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Art and Culture Asia Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Holidays Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Summer. It’s About Time.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer Solstice                                      Waxing Strawberry Moon

     

    The longest day of the year.  Light triumphant, streaming, steaming.  The darkness held at bay.

    Summer Solstice

    This is an astronomical phenomenon transformed and translated into a spiritual one.  We humans have over millennia taken solstice and equinox alike as moments out of time, a sacred caesura when we could review our life, our path as the Great Wheel turns and turns and turns once again.

    The Celts first divided their year into two:  Beltane, the beginning of summer, and Samhain, literally summer’s end.  As their faith tradition developed, they added in both solstices and equinoxes.  Since Beltane and Samhain occurred between the spring equinox and the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice respectively, they became known as cross-quarter holidays.  Imbolc and Lughnasa filled in the other two cross-quarter spots.

    It is the eight holidays, the four astronomical ones and the four cross-quarter, that make up the Great Wheel.  In the most straight forward sense the Great Wheel emphasizes cyclical time as opposed to linear or chronological time.  This seems odd to those of us raised in the chronological tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought in which there is an end time.  With an end to time the obvious influence on our perception of time is that we progress through the days until they become years, which become millennia until the Day of the Lord or that great risin’ up mornin’ when the dead live and time comes to a stop.

    That this is an interpretation rather than a fact rarely crosses the mind of people raised on birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations of one year as it comes followed by the next.  Our historical disciplines from history itself to the history of ideas, art history, even geology and the theory of evolution all reinforce the essentially religious notion of time as a river flowing in one direction, emptying eventually into an unknown sea which will contain and end the river.

    Immanuel Kant, in attempting to reconcile the dueling metaphysics of two apparently contradictory philosophical schools (rationalists and empiricists), hit on the notion of time and space as a priori’s, in a sense mental hardwiring that allows us to perceive, but is not inherent in the nature of reality.  That is, we bring space and time to the table when we begin ordering our chaotic sense impressions.  My interest in the Great Wheel and in the traditional faith of my genetic ancestors came in part from a long standing fascination with the question of time.  We are never in yesterday or tomorrow, we are always in now.  What is time?  What is its nature and its correct interpretation relative to the question of chronological versus cyclical time?

    I have not settled these questions, not even in my own mind, and they continue to be live topics in philosophy.  Learning to pay attention to the Great Wheel, to the now, and to the specific place where I live has pushed me toward the cyclical view, as has gardening and now the keeping of bees.  It is, today, the Summer Solstice.  Again.  As it was the last time the earth visited this location in space (ah, yes, space.  another conversation which we’ll bracket for now) and as it will be the next time.  This is a literally cyclical view of time based on the earth’s orbit around the sun, one which returns us, over and over to much the same spot.

    Next summer when the solstice arrives the asiatic lilies will be ready to bloom, Americans will be getting ready to celebrate the fourth of July and kids will be out of school.  The mosquitoes will have hatched, the loons returned and basketball will finally be over.  These kind of phenological observations depend on the repetitive, cyclical character of natural events.  There is a real sense in which this time does not move forward at all, rather it exists in a state of eternal return, one solstice will find itself happening again a year later.  Is there any progress, from the perspective of the solstice, from one to the next?  Not in my opinion.

    I don’t deny the intellectual value of arranging knowledge in what appears to be a rational sequence. It aids learning and explanation, but it may well be a mistake to think that sequence exists outside our mental need for it.  It may just be that time is, in some sense, an illusion, a useful one to be sure, but an illusion none the less.

    Even if it is, we still will have the Summer Solstice and its celebration of light.  We will still have the Winter Solstice and its celebration of the dark.  We can see each year not as one damned thing after another, but as a movement from the light into the dark and back out again.  We can see the year as a period of fallowness and cold (here in the temperate latitudes) followed by a period of fertility and abundance.  This is the Great Wheel and it currently makes the most sense to me.  That’s the light I have today anyhow.  Let’s talk next year at this time.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Bees Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Great Work Holidays Humanities Myth and Story 📎and tagged

  • Mabon (Fall) 2009

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                               Waxing Blood Moon

    Equinox.  Today is the fall equinox.  In spring we celebrate the shift towards yet more light and warmth as the trend toward lengthened days sees daylight overtaking the night.   Now the shift has a different, more somber direction.  At the Summer Solstice the hours of daylight began to shrink in relation to the hours of darkness.  At this equinox the night begins to predominate, an acceleration that will reach its peak at the Winter Solstice.

    Contemporary Wiccans (some at least) call this equinox Mabon and see it as the final harvest festival.  My own understanding and practice sees Mabon as the second of three harvest festivals:  Lughnasa (ended yesterday), Mabon and Samhain (Summer’s End).  Here on the 45th latitude the gardening year does begin to wind down now.

    On farms, however, the corn harvest lasts well into October and even in our garden we have carrots, parsnip, garlic and potatoes still in the ground.   In the ancient British Isles the end of summer meant deciding how much livestock you could feed through the winter.   If there was too little food for your herd, a certain number of animals would be slaughtered and their meat prepared to sustain the family over the winter.

    In either case though the fall equinox is the moment when the Great Wheel takes a decisive turn toward darkness.  That shift, along with the senescence in the garden and in the trees and fields, makes this an appropriate time for taking stock.  Kate and I are in the midst of preserving through canning, drying and storing the fruits of our summer’s work.  Grain and corn gets driven to the cathedrals of the plains in open trucks filled to the brim with yellow or golden seeds.  The elevators fill up as does our newly built store room.

    On a personal level this turn of the Great Wheel offers us a similar opportunity, that is, a time to take stock of the summer, the last year, even the course of our life.   Experience the joy of taking in to yourself the fruits you have harvested as a result of your own hard work.  Yes, money may be a part of that, but it is not the most important.  How have you increased in wisdom?  Have you and a significant other grown in your relationship?  Has a relationship that needed to come to an end done so and allowed you to move into a new phase of life?

    This is a wonderful festival for gratitude.  In fact, if you do nothing else to acknowledge this transition, take a moment to make a list of people and things for which you are grateful.  You could take this one step further and make others in your life aware of your gratitude.

    Finally, on a life level, the Great Wheel’s turn at Mabon symbolizes the autumn of our lives.  If this is where you are on your ancient trail, Mabon prompts you to consider the gifts and lessons we have embraced along the way.  The Great Wheel turns toward the final harvest, that day when we will be gathered up into the abundance from which we came and to which we return.  Present to us now that the years ahead are fewer than the ones behind this knowledge can enrich these autumnal days.  Life becomes more precious, an experience to be savored, lingered over, greeted with joy hour by hour, day by day.

    In the end the Wild Hunt comes for all of us, the just and the unjust.  The Great Wheel teaches us that even after it comes, life will go on and that, in some fashion, we will all be part of it.  Come to think of it, this may be my best answer to the question about the after life.


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  • Woodpeckers and The World of Ideas

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                             Waxing Harvest Moon

    All afternoon as I have wandered the precincts of Enlightenment thought a pileated woodpecker has drilled one of the dead trees in our woods.  The sound compels attention, a drummer of a truly ancient tribe with a steady and resonant sound.  Each time it comes I’m drawn away from the abstract world of ideas and the delicate process of translating thought into words.

    The woodpecker sounds push me away from the desk, here where I now have three desktop computers, two monitors, two large external hard drives, a router, a cable modem and a weather station in front of me, two printers and a phone off to my right.

    When I turn toward the sound, my gaze lights on the purple blossoms of clematis, a fragrance worthy of tiny glass stoppered bottles selling high and it’s mine to enjoy for free.  This plants is special, because it’s plant of origin was in the garden of a woman who died from breast cancer.  We got our plant several years ago and I have divided it many times.

    Then I notice the late afternoon sun, so low now.  By September 20th the earth will have moved enough along on its orbit that the angle between us and the sun will diminish to 46 degrees, a decrease of 23 degrees from its high at the Summer Solstice.   By December 20th it will decline another 24 degrees to its low of 22.  The angle casts interesting shadows, illuminates the clematis and a late hemerocallis bloom, a golden orange set on fire by our one and only true star.

    Both of these places, the abstract world of thought, nestled in that small yet infinitely large space between my ears, and the cabaret set with a woodpecker drumming and Sol doing the lights exist, yet the relationship between them has felled many trees and spilled gallons of ink.  In what way can my conception of reason, a chunky idea studded with links and nested in a web that includes Europe, the mind of God and the Lake Minnetonka Unitarian-Universalist Society, be like the woodpecker, its lattice combed skull vibrating with each pile driver punch driven in a quest for food?

    Its equivalence to the liquid, dying sunlight is more accessible, more plausible.  But why?  How does that sweet clematis fragrance fit?  It is all a mystery, yet here I sit writing about it.  Another mystery.


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