This year Christmas snuck up on me.
Todd puts up lights in Des Plaines
Dad and I mail many of our gifts and that was accomplished in time, but it seems like I am just getting in the mood now, and this is already my last column before the holiday.
Thanksgiving was late, I know, and then there’s no snow – no white Christmas? I’ve only been back in Wisconsin for four years, but it’s always been a white Christmas. It even rained this week, the damp balmy air feeling more like spring than Christmas.
Other things are out of whack, too. It’s hard to stay poised for war for so many months, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Since Sept 11 of last year so many things have happened Dad and I were thinking we had to check the timeline for the Afghanistan war. It seems like it happened much further in the past than just last winter.
It could be I’m just getting older. Time flies by at breakneck speed and I don’t have time to read everything I want, much less accomplish what I need to do at work and at home.
I bought some new lights for the one big tree in the yard since squirrels chewed through the old lights, leaving them in shreds. Lights are still not up as I write this – I guess I will just have to get out there at night because the big problem is so little daylight. It is already dark when I head home, and it’s even a little dim in the mornings.
I like Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening.” “The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.”
This metaphor for mortality is poignant at this time of year. Living in the deep woods, I sometimes go out into the cold at 11 or midnight. Orion is up in the sky (my favorite constellation) with the three stars that make up his belt very visible; other stars that form his sword hang from the belt. The Pleiades, or seven sisters, is a little ways up and to his left.
According to Greek mythology, Orion, the hunter, was in love with one of the seven sisters who form the Pleiades, but she would have nothing to do with him. His life ended when he stepped on a Scorpion. The Gods felt sorry for him so they put him in the sky with his dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. They also put all of the animals he hunted up there near him. Scorpius, however, was placed on the opposite side of the sky so Orion would never be hurt by it again. It’s a tender story about a vulnerable warrior. One would never guess this dominant archer in the sky is there because he was pitied.
The night air is clean and cold as I look up – all is quiet. It seems everything is poised, waiting for whatever is next.
Maybe that’s what Frost was expressing in his poem. It seems so important to stop my rushing around, even for a short moment, to notice the world around me, and then go back to the fray.
Solstice is tonight, Dec. 21, at exactly 7:14 p.m. our time. It’s the longest night of the year, and metaphorically, the deepest dark before the coming of the light.
In the atmosphere of this quiet, holy time, messages from the unconscious are perhaps more available in dreams and in other ways. The veil is thinner between the knowable and the unknowable.
I know I am going to light a few candles tonight.