Look on the Bright Side Day
But look quickly because the bright side is very short on this day.
It’s the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Being the weird creatures that we are, humans have noted and celebrated this day most notable for its scarcity of light, for a long, long time. It is the day when it seems as though sunlight has been dwindling day after day for so long that the diminution of luminance must go on until the light is completely extinguished—and indeed if you live within the northern polar circle the sun does not peek over the horizon for about a month every year surrounding the solstice.
Of course, for a long, long time northern and southern folks were stuck in their own hemispheres, each trapped in their own seasons of darkness and light.
Ancient peoples, and we’re talking ten thousand years ago, in the middle of the stone age, created sites such as Stonehenge that marked the solstices. Although the huge standing stones of Stonehenge, the ones that line up with the sunrise of summer solstice and the sunset of winter solstice, were not placed for another five thousand or so years, the site was significant for some kinds of rituals long before. Holes for large wooden posts that were place in an east and west alignment dating back to 8000 BC have been found there.
(There is a very rough counterpart in the Atacama Desert in Chile; some piles of stones called saywas built by the Incas five centuries ago that align with the solstices.)
I went to Stonehenge for the first time when I was eight years old. It was very early spring and freezing cold and windy out on Salisbury Plain. It was also 1963, and there were no barriers set up or visitor centers or anything to prevent you from mingling with the stones and the ghosts of ancient human spirits. You just parked your car and walked across a field to the magnificent stones, some standing, some looking like they’d been tossed aside as part of an abandoned game of dominoes played by giants. In fact, one of the larger stones, part of a restoration project, had just a few weeks before been knocked over by fierce winds destabilized by sodden ground.
It seemed not like walking back in time, but as though time was removed as a dimension.
But time doesn’t really stop, of course. In fact, the solstices are magical because they balance, in a passing moment of time, between darkness and light, while north and south balance each other, too, one dark and one light. All is poised for a moment of transition, and then here in the north, we begin to see the brightening side again, as though we could leave the darkness behind.
In you have doubts, we would simply refer you to Monty Python.