I'm dusting off my annual Solstice diary and reposting it today. It's not long, but it's heartfelt.
Although I am not there now, for a lot of years I lived in the Pacific Northwest.
Of all of the meanings that have been assigned to the winter holidays -- be they Christian, Jewish, cultural, pagan, secular, whatever -- what has come to be, for me, the most meaningful aspect of this season is the solstice.
Autumn has always a lovely but difficult time of year for me, living as I did for so long in the Northwest. Days become appallingly short during November and into December, and when the gloom of cloud cover and rain is added to the mix, what we Northwesterners end up with at times is going literally for days without seeing the sun.
(Ironically, now that I'm residing in "sunny" Southern California, what do we have here, and have had for the past week? Pouring down rain, gloom, wind, and not a single glimpse of the sun in days. It's like Seattle followed me down here.)
It is -- and I really can't come up with a better word to describe it -- rather a bummer.
And it seems it isn't just a bummer for modern-day residents of the Northwest. Cultures all over the world, including Pacific Northwest Native Americans, have celebrated the winter solstice for centuries -- perhaps millennia -- as the time of the rebirth of the sun, and the return of light to the world.
I've posted the Northwest Native American Raven myth for the past couple of years at this time of year, but Northern Exposure tells the story far better than I ever could, so without further ado:
Happy Solstice.