Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Shortest Day and Longest Night

Till Eulenspiegel will start singing and laughing when the sun finally rises today, the shortest day of the year. I’m told that we’ll have about nine hours of daylight on this, the winter solstice. Not yet, not as I write this. An older post here has more on solsticial mechanics, and this one more on the sage trickster who was, as wise men tend to be, a bit of a contrarian. That wisdom tells us that we must be jolly because our times are dark. In light of that, it is also worth our while to celebrate the recurring seasonal events now that our culture has replaced our holy days with shopping extravaganzas. But the worm shall turn. And after it does it will be time to mourn, because what goes around comes around. The light is on its way now, more and more, Spring just around the corner. Notable this year has been the lunar eclipse that darkened the darkest day even more around 3:30 a.m.—but for us this was just hear-say because a dark cloud cover obscured the obscuration.
Image credit Wikipedia here.

2 comments:

  1. It's great to celebrate the solstices and all the other sidereal events. I used to schedule my dentist appointments on the equinox, spring and autumn, and was extremely punctual... until that day they had to change it for some reason. I was never in sync after that.

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  2. Cheers to the increase of light.
    Nice post!

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