just wanted to remind you to keep your World Almanacs, your Old Farmer's Almanacs, etc., well out of sight. especially if you have one of them in your car. along with, say, a road atlas. yes, virginia, this is a real headline: "FBI issues alert against almanac carriers." be afraid. be very afraid. and not necessarily of almanac carriers, either.
wouldn't Ben Franklin be surprised?
we've had a very busy six days of holiday visiting, eating, driving up and down the roads, walking in the woods, eating, looking at christmas decorations, eating, playing with children, cooking, and, oh yes, eating. now we are left in peace and quiet at an almost end-of-the-year tuesday afternoon, to pick up the pieces and get back into a resting groove. i still cannot save or edit an entry in the normal fashion on AOL journals, despite the joyful announcement on Christmas eve that all had been solved. so i am still using IE to get into my journals and write an entry. this is a pain in the neck. but i am going to spend some lengthy time later today, or perhaps tomorrow, reading other journals, reading the internet blogs i frequent, reading news, catching back up with the world. my brother in law is a newspaper addict, and he went cold turkey with nary a Post or Times, Sun or Enquirer brought into the house. i did nearly the same thing with the internet, except that we all felt a need to keep up with the events in Iran. it makes me wonder wonder wonder, why we feel compelled to inflict so much pain and injury on one another as human beings. nature, life, "Acts of God," can devastate us so utterly. we should all be here on earth acting only as agents of loving-kindness to our fellow creatures, of whatever skin color, nationality, language, religion. my soul aches for the people of Iran who have lost so much.
so, i'll be back to talk about my holidays, what i'm reading, thoughts on this, that and the other pretty soon. vacation continues for a while, i say with supreme gratitude.
This picture illustrates the preceding entry. this dancer is from Santa Clara Pueblo, i couldn't find any from Acoma. but it is so very similar that i went ahead and used it. i'm ending the previous post here, because i had Fear of Too Many Characters.
we stayed til all the public dances were finished, then skidded down the hill in the ice to our car. one of the Indians told us that after all the visitors left they would take the figure of the Infant Jesus thru the village to one of the larger houses for the night. the dancers would follow, and dance for most of the night. how we would have loved to experience that, but we knew it was not our place.
It was a special day, we felt like we were part of something stretching back through the ages, something connected to both Earth and Spirit. this Christmas we are staying close to home, going to my brother's house in Pennsylvania to visit with nieces and nephews and....wait for it....GREATNEPHEWS! on the weekend my sister and her family will come out from D.C. for some holiday time at the beach.
so, this is my wish to the AOL journal community for a time of peace, joy, family closeness and love. light candles, eat cookies, love the ones who share your journey. i'll be back online next week.
last year at this time we were in New Mexico, visiting friends recently moved to the mountains near Grants. on Christmas Day G and i left our friends, one having to go in to work and one desperately sick with a bad cold, to go to Acoma Pueblo for the dances. we were too late to catch a shuttle up the mesa, so we climbed up on foot in the bitter cold. the ancient adobe church of San Esteban del Rey was cleared of chairs, though Indians who had come from the village to watch had brought their own folding seats and were arrayed around the edges of what was now a beaten earth dancing floor. soon we heard bells, drums and chanting coming from deep in the crooked alleyways of the town, and the procession of dancers slowly wended its way towards the church plaza. the Christmas dances in the Pueblos of northern New Mexico are the Deer Dances, one of the many totem animal dances performed throughout the year. the dancers wear evergreen boughs attached to legs, arms, and coming down over their faces like a mask. they wear antlers, hold sticks in their hands which function as the deer's front legs. they wear bells and skins and all manner of things hanging from belts. the effect is of deer dancing through a forest of evergreens. it is magical and ancient. they dance into the church, then dance there in the center of the watchers, in front of the nativity scene up on the altar, in a stirring mixture of the pagan and the christian.
the magic of the Solstice is present in the totem of the deer (think 8 tiny reindeer, where did that come from? yes!), the figure of the shaman (the origins of santa claus), the evergreen branches (symbolic down thru the ages of life springing eternal even in the depths of winter), the bells again call up the figure of the shaman, the one who can communicate between the worlds of the human and the spirit. and all of this presented to the figure of the Baby Jesus in his manger-crib on the altar in the dark smoke-smelling church. the dancers then go back out to the plaza and dance around the fire that the tribal elders are tending through the day and night.
The Shortest Day
So, the shortest day came
and the year died.
And everywhere down the centuries
of the snow, white, world
came people, singing, dancing,
to drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees
They hung their homes with evergreens.
They burned beseeching fires all night long
to keep the year alive.
And when the new day sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all across the ages you can hear them
echoing behind us. Listen.
All the long echoes sing the same delight
This shortest day.
As promise wakens in the sleeping land
They carol, feast, give thanks, and dearly love their friends.
And hope for peace. And so do we here now this year.
-Susan Cooper
just in from the hot tub, feeling warm and relaxed, quiet and good. all of which are most definitely not how i usually feel. it's a beautiful cold night, clear skies full of stars, satellites, planes, etc. lots of twinkling lights up there, as well as everywhere in the neighborhood. whole herds of lighted reindeer in yards all around us, you could read a newspaper at midnight on most of the front lawns on the street. nice, but making the stars that much harder to see. light pollution, big time. that's the curmudgeon speaking, really i love holiday lights. but i love more to go to the beach and look at the skies without the surrounding clutter.
yesterday afternoon i mailed off four packages to family children, and there's still a couple to go. G and i had a delightful afternoon of shopping (yes, on the busiest shopping day of the year, so tonight's news informed me. it was the Big Story on every channel, imagine that. in this world today, THAT's the lead story, in baltimore, washington, philadelphia and salisbury.) for some of the kids, there's a few items that are proving impossible to find at this late moment. chinese buffet shored up our resolve, and we actually had a good time. it's so fine to be able to spend some time together just kicking back, to be on vacation together, light candles, buy cute little outfits for grandchildren, cook real meals, starwatch in the hot tub, stay up much too late reading novels. so, that's my story for now, the journals are very quiet today. everyone is.........shopping? decorating? baking? sleeping after working massive overtime? unable to save an entry? are they ever going to fix that? i'm using the coming in to my journal thru netscape process, which so far is working.
Chanukah begins tonight at sundown and continues for the next 7 days. because G is jewish, and we have a collection of beautiful menorahs, we celebrate this festival with panache! It is not a biblical holy day, and in the rabbinical tradition is quite a minor holy day. it has become a larger celebration in this country because of its proximity to Christmas, giving jewish children thier own occasion to light candles, receive gifts, sing special songs, enjoy special foods. The food! as the holiday commemorates a miracle involving oil, the food for the holiday also involves things cooked in oil, potato latkes and other rich greasy delights. here is a site that will introduce you to latkes and to some delightful stories about them.
since one of the names for Chanukkah is the Festival of Lights, since it occurs in deep midwinter, since it is so clearly an occasion of renewal and rebirth (they were rededicating the Temple in Jerusalem when they discovered there was only one small vial of oil for the temple lights), since the main ceremony consists of lighting an evergrowing number of candles against the darkness, it is my belief that this is but one more example of the ancient calling-back of the Sun, to light, warm and renew the earth, which we know as Solstice.
(this is an entry i wrote tuesday afternoon, posting was thwarted by the gremlins in the journal-machine.)
okay, i'm back, grades are turned in, merriment and jollity of a departmental nature have been enjoyed, we've all wished one another a restful holiday. so, let the resting begin! the weekend in DC was delightful, despite Sunday's vile weather. we enjoyed good food, adorable children, high drifts of political babble. this admin has brought my siblings and their SO's into the camp i occupied alone in the family for many years. now we communally raise our blood pressure when together, out-outraging one another in fine fettle. especially after several bottles of Jim's good wine. this is a tribal activity i miss here in redneck southern DE, so the opportunity was cherished.
By now everyone - journalists, pundits, bloggers, politicians - has had the chance to pontificate upon Saddam's capture, and to begin to pontificate upon its implications for the future. from what i have read so far i offer you tomdispatch, with Engelhardt's own commentary as well as good stuff from Stephen Shalom, Juan Cole, and James Carroll. i love Tom's opening sentence: "Sometimes doesn't it feel as if we here in the US were all sharing in some vast delusionary experience?" Carroll states my own feelings about the Saddam event quite succinctly: "That he was caught in a hole, obviously unrelated to the guerrilla resistance, is a turning point in nothing that matters now, not in restoring order to Iraq, not in rebuilding structures of international law, not in thwarting terrorism, not in stemming the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, not in reconciling the West and the world of Islam."
We'll be going to DC tomorrow for three days, for a family get-together. i can hardly believe this weekend has finally arrived, it's all that's kept me putting one foot in front of the other for the past month. as the family groupings include three darling children, we will have more than enough fun, for pretty sure.
here's an essay from one of my favorite newfound blogs, Orcinus. it's a very thoughtful piece on his morphing from political conservative to liberal. it was not an overnight nor a linear process, but a journey i think many of you might enjoy following him through. i'm reading his blog entries and archives and finding much food for thought. and then, do me a favor and go here to my imaginary friend TankGurl's journal and give your best shot at answering her very sincere cry for enlightenment. (perhaps also read her two entries previous to this one, it might help.) she doesn't want the administration answers, she wants real ones. do you have any?
i give you good weekend: make cookies, light candles, play with children.
It's finally here. semester's end! friday morning writing class met to hand in Final Projects. I also had them answer some questions with an eye to evaluating the class, textbook, general direction for the future. i hate the book, and to their credit, so do most of them. it is template writing, giving them model essays to use as patterns, with stultifyingly boring topics. i did a lot of other stuff, including having them keep dialogue journals, and they've given me ideas for yet more to do beyond the book. i've been nagging the department to change to a better text, but it won't happen in the coming semester. they've already given textbook orders to the bookstore. i don't know if i'll have the class again next term anyway. won't know what i'll have until after the holidays, once registration is mostly completed. it looks as if i will have a section of Beginning Spanish, though. i haven't taught anything but ESL for such a long time, this will be a challenge.
after class a gang of South Korean students took me out to lunch. they are currently my favorite group, and fast becoming our largest constituency of ESL students. i was seriously challenged when they first began showing up in classes. i speak no asian languages, and even their names seemed impossible to learn and remember. i try to refrain from translation as a method of teaching something, but when my back is to the wall i can always use it for Hispanic, Haitian and most European students. not so for Koreans. but they are, as a group, so willing and motivated, not to mention loving and generous, that we have bridged the communication gap in numerous ways. it's kind of devastating though, they come to DTCC and learn English, then leave for Baltimore or one of the Penna cities in search of better jobs for themselves and better educations for their kids. the chicken plants are bringing them over for a year of indentured servitude, after which they are free to leave and find real lives. they do get green cards out of the deal, so they grit their teeth and make it through. many have university degrees already, and are pretty horrified at the jobs they end up doing in chicken processing.
I only intended a lighthearted telling of the origins of what we think of as Christmas imagery: reindeer, candles, greenery, holly, chimneys, trees, gift-giving, etc. BUT! I find myself lost in the wonders of research about the first known Solstice celebrations. Hoping not to bore you, I nevertheless must share some of this with any reader venturing this way. Time and space limit me to several examples, and those I'll use are from two of my own heritages: Celtic and Native American. This leaves out huge expanses of time and place, but it leaves much for you to discover yourself.
I'm still on the subject of astronomy and the building of sites to map the heavens, observe and mark the important seasonal moments. Everyone knows of Stonehenge, though no one, not the archeologists, scientists, astronomers, mythologizers, really knows much about it. And it is only one of hundreds of neolithic and megalithic sites in Great Britain whose mystery ensnares modern observers. Two that seem to have been built as both tombs and celestial observatories are Maeshowe in the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland, and Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland. They are both spectacular sites. If you go to the Maeshowe link you can connect to a webcam that is stationed in the sun chamber from now through the actual days of the Solstice. Both of the websites enthralled me, with history, photos, links to yet more information. Even the photos convey the sense of awe and mystery that this turning of the year must have embodied.
(Continued in next entry)
These were hunters and farmers sophisticated enough to have constructed a building where the light entered precisely at sunrise on the Solstice and illuminated a special chamber for about fifteen minutes during the Solstice only.
In the Southwest of the North American continent the Anasazi People built a society at Chaco Canyon that continues to amaze researchers to this day. These ancestors of the Pueblo Indians built a celestial calendar there at Chaco that today we call the Sundagger. It does the same thing the lightbox at Newgrange does, provides an opening for the sun on the Winter Solstice to precisely mark the event on the cliff walls behind it (it's in the photo that accompanies these entries). The Hopi and Zuñi peoples also celebrated the Winter Solstice; many of their houses having plates fixed to their walls that were lit by the rays of the sun passing through a small window only on this one day of the year.
In the days between now and this year's solstice I will (really) talk about the traditions we still honor in midwinter and how they have descended from far older traditions, traditions linked to nature, the seasons, the cycles of the year.
i'm not going to say a lot about al gore's endorsement of dean, but it's the happening thing today. bruce has a very good two part article about it on Old Hickory and i advocate you go read his comments. i admire and respect al gore, and will take his endorsement into account when primary time comes around. my heart and soul remain with dennis k., he's been my candidate since long before he even announced. i've suggested him on every questionnaire the DNC or Nancy Pelosi send me, i've talked him up to my friends and relations. the sad truth remains true, he won't get the votes, the endorsements, the financial whammy, to become the actual presidential candidate. i wish this were the world where that could happen. it ain't.
instead of my commentary, i'll give you molly ivins', another good old texas gal, endorsement of...yes, howard dean. which may actually matter more to me than gore's. her heart is also with dennis. she's voted for losers all her political life (yep), and she feels this time it's more important to vote for a winner than to vote for the candidate of her dreams. and that's what it's going to come down to. picking a winner and seeing to it that he (i don't say "he or she" because i think moseley braun is already out of the realistic field of dreamers) gets total support and backing and just, goddamn it, wins.
i've been reading out on the web, news and commentary. and also IM'ing with a friend in DC who shares my political outrage and feelings of angry helplessness. she's just read a book called Sleeping With The Devil, which i thought might be about Laura Bush, but is about our friendship with the Saudis. i need to check into it some more, but it certainly got her mojo working. good to have an internet rant like that.
life is very busy right now, i'm working on a couple of things i want to post here, but i'm too scattered until finals and grades are over. anyway, i don't know why i want to work on political posts. the most comments i've yet gotten, i think, came from the silly little thing about johnny depp and his people mag cover! frivolity sells, i see.
yesterday we drove to annapolis to go shopping at Whole Foods, it was a bright cold day and a drive through the snowfields was a lovely thing. so was Whole Foods, such a better foodshopping experience than, say, Food Lion. we don't have a lot of local choices, for clean and healthy foods. during the summer we grow our own veggies and don't eat much meat, but now i'm making soups and stews, winter foods. as we drove home the moon rose over the chesapeake, huge and full and brilliant, in a sunset sky of mauve, pink and deep blue. ah, cosmology, how we have lost a sense of wonder. looking at that moon, that lovely sky, i thought....how could we not worship a heavenly object of such radiant powerful beauty?...not see the moon as goddess, divine entity, beseech her for favors, sing and dance on her feast days? it was all i could do to tear my eyes away and keep us from going off the bay bridge. so, fulfilling hunting and gathering and a divine experience. on a cold and windy sunday evening.
the winter solstice... the day of the "standing still sun," the turning point of the year in the northern hemisphere. from the summer solstice on through the autumnal equinox the sun has progressively been getting lower and lower in the sky until - on the day of the winter solstice, it reaches its lowest point. the shortest day. for as far back as we know anything about humans, in almost every culture in every inhabited corner of the earth, this day was noted, marked, celebrated. it was a day of holy awe, mixed (as awe almost always is) with fear. what if the sun does not return this year? what if we remain in darkness? for people whose lives depended on first hunting and gathering sustenance, then growing and raising it, the weather was of deep and primary importance. so what amount to solar observatories were built, and observations made; then ceremonies, feasting, antic noise to attract the sun's attention, coax it back, took place. the celebrations of light we know today are all descendants of this heritage. it is my intention to spend some time as we approach the winter holidays discussing solstice/yule/christmas traditions and their linkage.
the winter solstice takes place in late december, this year's will happen on December 21, around 9 pm CST. this snowy day, this frozen night, remind me to pay attention to the natural world around me, not to hide from it, to realize we are approaching a fundamental seasonal hemispheric event. i'll be posting entries about this for the next couple of weeks. or, you could go to this lovely site and spend the next two weeks browing through their wondrous lore.
(this is a previous entry, on which the photo bore an ad from the software co. i used to convert the image to a jpeg file. the incredible, the awesome, the goddess-incarnate, Muse herself, sent me instructions on how to crop an image. who knew? there is a tool lurking on the "File" dropdown menu that will let us do all kinds of things with image files. so, i removed the banner and now i am reentering my previous post.)
During the leadup to the war, the early days of the war, this piece made the lefty rounds of the internet. you may have encountered it then. in light of the continuing carnage in the middle east, i think it is time to read it again. it's frightening how something written 100 years ago, during a war most Americans have never heard of (the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902), can be so uncannily accurate about contemporary attitudes. I ran into this recently at Infinite Jest, and was hit in the solar plexus by it all over again.
it's bitterly cold, it might snow soonish, the moon is a cold bright eye. time to get some firewood around this place. put the down comforters on the beds. tonight i made a big pot of posole, just had some with a glass of red wine. warms the innards right up. we begin the descent into the darkness. heading towards solstice, the true midwinter celebration. the happy chica is beginning a lengthy series on the historical aspects of christmas. i'm not sure what this means, but i do hope it will include lots of solstice lore, there is so much wonderful stuff there.
as for me, i won't be doing too much here, descending into the pit of finals and end of term grades also. for a couple of weeks that will keep me pretty busy. ask me how much i look forward to the winter break. there are no words. it's a wordless yearning. but a deep one.
something to look forward to finding, maybe under the tree, during that break: a new book by John le Carré, Absolute Friends. if you know le Carré, you know this is an uptotheminute political novel, and not a happy one. read this interview with him in the british paper, The Independent, and see if it doesn't sound like just the antidote for all that cozy holiday cheer.
