Standing Still

12/19/24 - some solstice notes on light and darkness

winter tide / author photo

Hello everyone:

Happy Solstice to you all. May you find peace and purpose amid the turbulence of this most extraordinary time to be alive.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read this week’s curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to the writing:

Here in the eastern U.S., the solstice arrives at 4:21 a.m. Saturday morning, between the deep silence of the witching hour and the bright revelation of dawn. If you’d like to prepare but are somewhere else on the globe, that’s 9:21 UTC (find your time here), but there’s nothing to see, really. A solstice is less an event than an imagined pause, a moment as quiet as the shift between tides.

Like the sea at its full ebb, here in the north the Sun seems to stop - solstice is rooted in the Latin sol “sun” and sistere “to stand still” - in its long declining autumnal path and, rejuvenated, begins to climb the sky again toward the distant warmth and greenery of Spring.

The solar reality is, of course, always a turbulent burning stillness. You and I are merely light-dependent particles in its orbit. The Sun is the warm soul around which this blue-green body of life spins in its annual path. What appears to us as the Sun’s pause is really one of two moments in our path in which Earth’s axial tilt has its most profound effect on the northern and southern hemispheres.

The days ahead, here in the north, will slowly widen at the edges, like a waking awareness, as both dawn and dusk reclaim the minutes, then hours, they've lost over the past six months. There's plenty of darkness left to experience - seemingly darker for the cold weeks of January and February ahead of us - but the light will have begun to reverse its tide.

To celebrate the solstice is to celebrate the miracle of our survival amid the cold reality of space. We did not know it for most of human history, but winter is a small but bitter taste of what lies outside this nurturing atmosphere

View of Earth on 2021 Winter Solstice from Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) on EUMETSAT’s Meteosat-9 in geosynchronous orbit. Credit: NASA

The light brings with it the memory of sustenance and the promise of life to carry us through the hardest months. Even now, seeds and rootlets embedded in their vast communities of microbes and living soil are prepared, when light and warmth release them, to grow restless and then to grow with a full-bodied embrace of the sun.

So much of life on Earth (in the temperate and polar zones) hinges on this annual tide of light. The sun fuels every living cell on the surface of the planet, which means that every ecological community is a conversation about light. It’s worth pausing with the solstice to think about how best to rebuild our portion of this world in a way which honors that conversation. After all, from the miracle of photosynthesis and the rhythm of seasonality we build our bodies, our families, our societies, our economies, and our wobbly empires.

The more we listen to the Earth breathing through its ancient cycles, the more we can remember to breathe with it.

What you must do is build a system of civilization that is as aware of darkness as it is of beauty.

That’s the gentle brilliance of Barry Lopez, from Horizons, a short documentary (just 20 minutes) with a narrative derived in part from one of the last in-depth interviews Barry gave before his death on Christmas day, 2020. His final instruction to us here speaks, I think, to his quest to help modern human society reach maturity. So much of what the new world holds dear is adolescent - constant growth, transactional relationships, sensations over sensibility, energy over purpose - as if we were blind to the future and unaware that winter always arrives to quiet the urgency of spring.

Barry had as his model of maturity the Indigenous societies he always consulted as he traveled the burning world:

Traditional people would say, This is something that has to be dreamed again… We need another way of knowing, and if we are to succeed at that we must listen not only to each other but also to those we have systematically marginalized.

The holidays that have meaning for us at this time all take place in the context of this profound phenomenon. Since Neolithic times (or earlier), humans outside the equatorial regions have celebrated the return of the light. (Even the terrestrial astronauts hunkered down in Antarctica have a century-old tradition of celebrating Midwinter Day on the June solstice.) The traditions we call Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule (in Scandinavia), Soyal (for the Hopi), Dong Zhi (in China), Yalda (in Iran), Inti Raymi (in Peru), and many more are rooted in our universal desire to pay homage to the gift of light, which is the gift of life.

six months of the Sun’s daily path captured by pinhole camera / credit: solargraph by Jose Palma via EarthSky.org

We note on our calendars that the solstice marks the threshold of winter and its months of cold bones. But that’s never made much sense to me. For one thing, it’s been cold and dark since early November. And if winter is a time of darkness, then why is it signified by the return of the light? A truer understanding of the season lies in the old expression, “When the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen.”

We know that our seasonal, circular life is framed by our inexorable orbit and etched into leaf and stone alike by the Sun. We bear witness every year to how the path back to Spring begins with the depths of winter still before us. But we should remember this: The solstice marks the return of the light but does not signify an end to suffering.

There is perhaps no better metaphor for hope.

Which is something to keep in mind, I think, in the months and years ahead.

Winterberry, spruce, and the ocean in between / author photo

I hope you find a moment to acknowledge the solstice. I’m not much for rituals, but I try to remember where I live once in a while. And it’s easy enough to pause on a late afternoon walk, or while sitting by a fire, and remember that the journey we’re on is tilting toward the light. Better yet, it’s good to remember that the light that’s returning is what we’re made of.

Happy Holidays to you all. Thank you for your interest in and support of my work here in the Field Guide. I hope that in some small way I’m helping to move us back into alliance and empathy with the real world. And for each of you I hope I’ve provided a bit of warmth in these dark days.

As always, thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

I’ll start with two follow-up articles related to my last week’s post, “Mirror Worlds.” Each one is about a different type of scary mirror:

From Fast Company, a quick review of the perspective behind philosopher Shannon Vallor’s new book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. Like Narcissus in Greek mythology, we risk falling in love with the warped image of ourselves that AI provides. Worse, “our new digital mirrors point backward,” she says, because they’ve been built on data from an age of flawed moral reasoning and limited intellectual range. Do we really want AIs to use the language and half-witted social crucible of the internet as a foundation?

And from the Times, “A ‘Second Tree of Life’ Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn,” a very spooky explanation of “mirror cells,” a form of synthetic life that we may soon be capable of making. I’ll let the article explain the science, but suffice it to say that the stark warning being issued by researchers - who want all research into mirror cells to be prohibited - includes a scenario in which artificial microbes infect and disrupt life on Earth because there are no natural systems equipped to fight them off.

Also from the Times, “Sorry, but this is the future of food,” a thoughtful and pragmatic answer to the question of how to revolutionize the global food system for the more crowded, wealthier civilization that’s coming. The author of the forthcoming book, We Are Eating the Earth, says we cannot let our nostalgia for small farms blind us to the need for large-scale, efficient agriculture. What the world needs, he says, is a “vibe shift”:

Most people who don’t farm don’t think much about agriculture, and we’ve fallen into a trap of assuming there’s virtuous agriculture and evil agriculture, just like clean energy and dirty energy. Instead, we should think of all farming as a necessary evil. It makes our food and it makes a mess. We should try to confine it, so that it doesn’t keep overrunning nature… But there’s no point in demonizing the industrial farmers who make the most food. We should just insist that they make less mess.

From CNN, a remarkably large-scale long-term effort to study the flow changes in all 3 million of Earth’s rivers over the last 35 years found massive change in a very short period of time. 44% of the planet’s downstream rivers diminished each year over that time, depriving natural and human communities of much-needed water, while 17% of the world’s upstream rivers have increased flow (due to melting ice and snow), causing a significant increase in flooding events.

From PBS, excellent news from the Montana Supreme Court, which has just upheld the important legal victory by young climate activists who sued the state because it “was violating residents’ constitutional right to a clean environment by permitting oil, gas and coal projects without regard for global warming.” The Montana state constitution protects residents’ right to a clean and healthful environment. For more on these vital “green amendments” that several states have adopted, check out For The Generations.

From Noema, a long and fascinating article on whether conservation must reimagine its role and encourage increasing control over the fragments of the natural world which are being protected. Specifically, the article digs into the idea of wildlife fertility control as a strategy to reduce conflict from spillover from “wild” areas into human communities. But the larger discussion is of environmental philosophy and how we imagine the relationship between human society and the diminished fragments of the natural world we are forced to manage, one way or another. The most rational outcome is an Anthropocene version of the management practiced by Indigenous societies for millennia:

Indigenous knowledge systems acknowledge the role of human beings in creating our shared landscape, but they do not make us uniquely privileged to command and marshal its future.