Winter Solstice

Today the sunlight tickles the land for but a moment. Winter Solstice has always been my New Year, a day of reflection and renewal, a day of certainty in the knowledge that the light of days will slowly begin to fill the hours longer and longer in the upswing to the plentitudes of summer.

Yet even as the cold reflects from the trees in casts of gray and the sun sits frozen and icy in the southern sky the slumber of the forest is broken often by foraging deer kicking away the frosted groundcover of leaves in hopes of unearthing a meager portion of sustenance.

The deer move slow now in the dying of these short days and sometimes if I’m quiet enough I can move slow as they do and move almost among them as they travel in those transition zones between old fields and third growth forests just before the overgrown farmlands converge to the mountains.

So now as the years plod along and the primordial significance of such times are mostly forgotten and subjugated to the whims of the “modern” I’ll keep taking a few steps back and looking hard into the short light of these winter days and fearing not the darkness of these long nights in hopes of glimpsing that rare element known as peace.

Of course all Summer Solstice Southern Hemisphere Folks can reverse these notions…