Once Upon a Solstice

For most of my life I have considered the solstice to be a moment to celebrate hope, depicted by the slow return of the sun to winter's long nights. Feeling the bright warmth of the return of spring always seemed like an aspirational expectation. It was just how it seemed to me, I suppose: warmth = good, cold = bad.

Maybe it's just age or its accumulation of experience, I don't know. But now I look at this eve of shadows, and feel both a rising pull towards the returning hours of sunlight, but a moment's stillness for the dwindling of the night.

Sunlight, moonlight, starlight; songs and silence. Both are notes upon the melodies that flutter through my heart, and I cherish them both. I no longer seem to feel an unfettered draw towards either one in particular, I love them both. They each are possessed of unique benefits and challenges, while we are buoyed aloft between them both - like a planet caught between orbit and rotation, satellites and sunlight. A steady and undeniable gravitational dance, hither and yon.

Too much of a thing, I suppose, yes? One element provides, and also provides a harmony and appreciation for the other. Not as opposition, but a renewed respect and perspective for what might otherwise seem the mirrored image.

I don’t quite know why I feel such a poetic response to this day, this year more than most. There’s an otherwise quiet reflecting in my mind this year, and to be honest I’m grateful for the relative silence I’ve encountered after several years of chaos and the surrounding madness of rage that years of global miscommunication have engendered.

And that has reminded me of just why it is I write. What has driven me to put metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper all these years, why I have always been pushed to take in the sworl and gyre of the stars and draw them into whatever pantheons they might belong. Maybe it’s just all fables and mythologies, but perhaps that is just the root of it? MCU Thor did once say “all words are made up”, and I guess there’s some solace in that. All paths come from faith, all faith comes from hope, all hope comes from a choice. It’s a sentiment, yes, but this is a season of sentiments, isn’t it?

Anyway. As this is that season, I choose to accept the night and the day, and look to the seasonal shifts as the mile markers they provide along this highway I walk: neither good nor ill but as choice makes them so.

And to you, dear friends, dear readers, I want to thank you for joining me along this path. I hope that these coming seasons fill your hearts and minds with comforting tales and happy beginnings, or of truly resolved and resolving endings, should the case there be. Be well, fellow travelers. Be merry. Be at peace.

New stories await us all.