'Tis the season

Today is the Solstice. Olé, I say, or to be truer to my Anglo-Saxon forebears on this northern day, hooray!

There’s always an irony in the solstice, I think. Today the days begin to get longer as the earth’s axis tilts back toward our personal star, that sun of ours. From here we’ll be able to watch the sunrise move from its southeast point in front of Deborah’s house back down the hill to the harbour and follow it through the equinox, when it will rise over by the lighthouse, until the other solstice on June 21, when it’s straight across the harbour from us and ready to start back southward again. The irony lies in the fact that the lengthening of day’s light that starts tomorrow, and the sun’s greater height in the noonday sky, signals the beginning and not the end of winter.

They knew all about this back in Hants County when they said:

As the days get longer
the cold gets stronger.

And it does, count on it!

I’m thinking of something by my old friend WCW called The Descent of Winter. Looking for it I came across “January Morning: Suite”, with this in it, addressed to his grandmother, I’m guessing, the same one whose last words you really should go here to read:

XV

All this----
was for you, old woman.
I wanted to write a poem
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can’t understand it?
But you got to try hard----
But----
Well, you know how
the young girls run giggling
on Park Avenue after dark
when they ought to be home in bed?
Well,
that’s the way it is with me somehow.

That’s the way it is with me too sometimes. I start off writing about the solstice and end up reminiscing about Williams and those years in Vancouver in the late 60’s when I first discovered his words. And then I remember a solstice celebration from back then when we were all self-declared pagans and where I wanted to roast a goose but couldn’t get a fresh one and spent a couple of greasy hours trying to thaw its frigid and elongated carcass in the bathtub for our feast that night.

So it is the solstice, the longest night of the year, and the day (sol + stit) when the sun stands still at its lowest point in the noon sky. But it is also the turning point toward the light, something all of us pagans (paganus: villagers) in this northern world can celebrate with our wassail (ves heill: be in good health!), both the occasion and consumption of it and the libation consumed.

So, like A. suggested this morning, let’s toast the day, let’s wassail!