Bethesda’s Second Annual Winter Solstice Diary
I am a Winter Solstice fan: The shortest day of the year, but the end of six months of lengthening darkness. I can understand how our early ancestors, watching the daylight hours shrink, feared darkness would overtake light completely. But then, as the days inched longer, they ecstatically greeted the resurgence of light.
I first appreciated the Winter Solstice in the months after 9/11, when fear and uncertainty gripped us while temperatures fell, and the light of hope was hard to sustain as each day’s sunlight decreased. As December slowly progressed, I yearned for the Solstice, hoping like the ancients, for fear to subside as the days finally grew longer.
And it did. There was a turning point at the end of 2001. Not based on any military victory or other event, but perhaps a lightening of spirit accompanying the natural reversal of darkness.
Last year I was a bit late to the Solstice party — I wrote a last-minute diary: Still time to put on that Druid outfit: 10 minutes to the Winter Solstice. I was shocked and dismayed when a commenter informed me that the Druids and Stonhenge were separated by 1,500 years. That’s right — The Stonehenge Druids were Fake News.
There were some great comments:
Bob’s Telecaster: I for one welcome our new nocturnal overlords.
Clio2: Helps us survive the cold of January and the winter-fatigue of February, to know that the arc of the universe is already bending towards our Spring!
Palafox: I believe the Covfefe people made use of the site.
I still believe in Dr. King’s “Arc of the Universe,” so I love any comment quoting it.
Yesterday, the day before the Solstice, there was a swirl of news certain to make us anxious and uncertain — a likely government shut-down; Mattis resigning; Deripaska Sanctions lifted, withdrawal from Syria; threats to Mueller from Whitaker and Barr.
No one knows how these will turn out. The terrain is new.
But we have the Solstice and the end of the march toward darkness in the skies to help us through.