Winter Solstice
- Mike Dickey
- Dec 20, 2024
- 3 min read
"The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory."
Growing up and living most of my life in the South, I never really got the power of this shortest day of the year, coming our way tomorrow. It's 7:30 in the morning here in Corning, snowy and cold with dim light filtering through slate gray clouds. It's beyond beautiful, and the stillness and peace of it all leaves one reflective.
I snapped this shot a little while ago, before the snow started falling. The colored lights surround the old Corning City Hall, now the Rockwell Museum.
This morning's Atlantic magazine feed featured an essay expounding on the feeling of this day.
I stayed away from the political pages, waking up in a strangely good mood and not wanting to spoil it. Schedules are set, bonuses calculated, decisions made. When P gets home this afternoon, we begin a period between now and the first of the year when we can just abide together, reflect on what comes next while not letting ourselves be anywhere but here and now, together.
Apparently this sort of presentness isn't trendy lately. The WSJ featured an interesting piece this morning about the fad of "manifesting".
The notion is that if you picture yourself doing or being something other than your crappy current existence, it'll come to pass. The book The Secret, written nearly two decades ago, has again become a best-seller, as these people create online storyboards showing them leading their best life in the future.
As an oldster, I smile at the notion that this is anything new. On my shelf has long been a paperback copy of As a Man Thinketh, written in 1903 by James Allen, which makes basically the same point. And anyone my age recalls the popularity of The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale's ubiquitous book that advises his readers to "picture yourself succeeding".
My sainted mother was all about positive thinking. On the wall of my bedroom when I was in elementary school was a photo of gulls flying over the water, with the caption "They Can Because They Think They Can." I always thought the quote came from some self-help book, but in fact its source was Virgil. For Issac's benefit, the original quote was "Possunt quia posse videntur".
Being a smartass child, I always responded in my head (never out loud, lest I hurt Mom's feelings), "They can because they're birds." No one ever accused me of seeing the bright side as a matter of habit.
I couldn't help noticing that the WSJ article profiles a number of folks who all happen to be women in their late 20s or early 30s with popcorn fart jobs like "influencer". Living in a land of digital make-believe seems to provide fertile territory for this sort of wishful thinking.
Still, I wish them all the best, and am feeling pretty good this morning, watching the snow fall outside and looking forward to the best gift of all, a quiet few days with Peg on the farm, a time just to be. As I typed that, I thought of one of my favorite exchanges near the end of one of my favorite movies, Bull Durham. Nuke's gone up to the bigs, the movie's climax has led to a denouement that leaves Crash and Annie sitting on her porch after Crash hits his last home run and decides to hang up his cleats:
Crash: “I got a lot of time to hear your theories. And I wanna hear every damn one of them, but now I'm tired, and I don't want to think about baseball. I don't want to think about quantum physics and I don't wanna think about nothin'. I just want to be.”
Annie: “I can do that, too.”
The Atlantic essay quotes from a song by the late David Berman called "Snow is Falling in Manhattan". My curiosity piqued, I wandered the internet and found several versions floating around. Below is a link to the one that struck me as best. It's hauntingly lovely, the perfect piece of music for this snowy morning in a place P and I love.
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