Christmastime is here. Happiness and cheer. That Charlie Brown song by Vince Guaraldi is always funny to me because it’s such a sad tune. Maybe intentionally so.
Christmastime means wintertime, when all the leaves are brown and the skies are gray. I'm always affected by the turn of the season. I just feel the shift and the changes that accompany. The changes in temperature, the air, the colors, the flora and fauna. And in autumn to winter, I feel the sun make its long, drawn-out goodbye. Goodbyes are hard but drawn-out ones can be extra melancholic and I sometimes want to just yell to the sun, "Just GO!" and run into the house, crying.
But I still need it, and even though it feels a million more miles away (on top of the already 91m) it's still there. Having it so low in the sky is so strange. It feels like such a tired sun. "This is the best I can do these days, the highest I can go." Maybe I should be more understanding, but then I remember that's not at all how it works and it's really I who has tilted away. It can feel like an estrangement.
But though I spend much more time indoors in winter, and often forget to find it for several days at a time, my body remembers how important sunlight is and I try to seek it out. If it's a sunny morning, I take my cat and we go outside to greet the sun, even if it does feel like waving bon voyage to some traveler high on a ship, bound for the horizon and place I can't get to.
Lately I've noticed how the seasons change the sunsets. Summer, when the sun takes center-stage, gives us such a show and in winter, sunsets give a meager appearance. If I were to be searching ardently for it, looking westwardly, I might not find it at all.
Except.
I live next door to some mountains who act as a giant guardian sunset-catcher. A mirror to reflect to me what I can't see with my own eyes. So it is often the case that instead of westward, I turn eastwardly to find the sun. My friend the mountain has become a relied-upon lookout to orient me, and tell me what it sees when I’m too low, the sun feeling too far away, too elusive for me to find.
Many years ago, I lived in a city that blocked much of the sky. Sunsets were happening but I couldn’t find them, unless I got outside the city and away from the skyscrapers. I was driving west to my home at the end of a sunstarved December day. Traffic was slow. I was faced with two things:
1. Quiet time to just think. Just think my thoughts with nothing to take me away from them. This is unusual, I realized, and essential, I also realized.
2) A brilliant sunset sky to gaze upon and enjoy and remind me of forgotten things. The sky at the top was blue, fading into sea foam green, fading into an orange haze directly above the horizon. There were three puffy clouds in my view and they were anything but white. The centers were a dark swirly purple and the edges burned in fluorescent orange. They really did look like someone had taken a highlighter and outlined them.
While staring at these things (the sunset and my thoughts), I was listening to a great rendition of Joy to the World by Sufjan Stevens. It is a little bit funky, but mostly just folksy-pretty. And as I stared at this brilliant sky, unable to do little else, a refrain from the song was taking place, a soundtrack to this moment, of "wonders of His love" repeating over and over.
It was a moment when I received an audible—and musical, bonus!—reminder of a thing easily forgotten, with visible evidence illustrated before me. And a feeling, fluorescent orange, of gratitude for this wonder before me and all around, blossomed up inside.
Today is the winter solstice, the yuletide, the Shortest Day, the peak of bleak at midwinter and I am celebrating. Instead of a bonfire, I have a heated oven. My yule log is a sliced up log of fruitcake cookies I will paint with amaretto and roll in powdered sugar. When I picture a solstice I imagine myself suspended between two places, held as a junction at the pinnacle of the ushering in of a holy reunion and turning point that can only come by way of bereavement. This marks the return of the sun. This is my ceremonial dance.
Joy to the world! Christmastime is here! Happiness and cheer!
I remember being in NY for the first time and during mid February....I was in awe of how little I saw of the sun for those few days. (At the time I lived in AZ where we don't even have mountains to take from the sky. The sky is so huge there! It's amazing like the mountains are amazing here.) So the sky felt so small and the sun, a foreign object amidst the city skyscrapers. Anyway, thanks for giving an interesting and fun read!