not this solstice

It’s something like tradition for me to pause today to observe and celebrate the winter solstice. I’ve always been finely attuned to and affected by the amount of light around me, even more so as I’m getting older. This darkest day of the year and the implied promise that tomorrow will be brighter is important to mark. Given its proximity to the end of the calendar year, it’s also a natural time both to look back and ahead.

Friends, this time I’d rather not do either.

The year behind me was the hardest of my life. By far. It’s not close. I watched my father take his last breath after months of suffering. Cancer took my beautiful, silly dog. I lost my democracy, and with that, gained an awareness that everything that matters to me is a joke, or something to be scorned, to a plurality of Americans. Through illnesses and injuries that rocked me, the kind that I’d have shrugged off a decade ago, I am starkly reminded that this body I inhabit is not just past the turn, but deep into the back nine.

And to look ahead? I literally shudder to think. I can’t imagine what sort of personal trauma awaits me and mine, and I dare not tempt this spiteful universe by speaking much more about that. But I can well imagine the chaos, suffering, and death that’s coming to our streets. Last time around, our institutions offered some token resistance, but now they’re all capitulating before the nightmare has even truly begun. The ship’s going down, there are no lifeboats, and nobody’s coming to help. What took decades, even centuries to build will be destroyed in months. Those few of us who still care will be mocked for it. Empathy’s for losers now.

So, yes. Solstice. Despite our national (global?) turn against science, it’s true whether we believe it or not: tomorrow, there will be a few seconds more daylight than there was today. Hooray.