I’m Culturally Parochial

Thus the shortest day for me is certainly on the 21st of December—because my parish lies in the Northern Hemisphere. Parish is the root of that word, parochial, from late Latin parochia, a parish, dated to 600 A.D., thus with Christendom having learned to walk. But even back then—reassuringly in this age of excessive change—this day was also the shortest. Some things remain reliably the same, and clinging to certainties, I rarely fail to note this day, parochially, because in the regions below (another parochial designation) the Equator, today is the Summer Solstice. And that’s something my viscera can’t quite believe. The night tomorrow will be just as short, subjectively, as tonight, but there is the knowledge, anyway, that light will grow until June 21st of 2015—when another period of mourning will begin. Right now we celebrate the Light’s Return.

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.