Joyous Solstice

[ickaimp]

Tonight is the longest night of the year.

Y'know, sometimes I have to wonder, what it was like before clocks and cars and computers and electricty when that actually -meant- something. Meant a great deal more than it does now. When people were more in tune with nature than by what greenwitch time they had to be to work.

Dunno, maybe its cause I'm unempolyed right now and aren't confined to the clock at the moment.

But sometimes, I just have to wonder... what was it like, staying up all night to tend the fire, or the Yule log, to make sure it didn't go out and to ensure a prosperous new year. With just the silence and the darkness and the fire and the howl of the cold wind and snow outside. And wonder if the night and the moment would ever end, or would it just wrap around like a comforting cold-and-warm blanket, never to see the sun again.

And maybe I'm just a bit puzzled right now because the candle I lit for solstice went out and won't relight.

... the House imps are up to something again.

Ah, well.

Joyous Solstice, everyone! Happy New Year!

Comments

Happy SunReturn!

[ysabet.livejournal.com]

Holding a dusk-to-dawn vigil is quite an experience, you’re right about that. In the SCA, I was given the rank of Laurel several years ago (it’s the equivalent of Knight, only it covers arts & sciences; it took me almost 18 years to achieve it, too), and traditionally a person becoming a Laurel holds a dusk-to-dawn vigil. You don’t HAVE to, but… I decided I wanted to anyway. So I did.

Vigils like this usually start off with people coming up and visiting with you, talking about what you plan on doing as a new Laurel and all, giving you advice, telling you jokes, dropping off gifts, etc., and that’s what went on until about 2 a.m. or so. We were at a campground in mid-Arizona, down in this little valley with a permanent spring—lots of trees, long grass and so forth; it rained the whole time and to make things interesting, we were *also* in the path of a major Brown Mexican Tarantula migration. The things were EVERYWHERE, on people’s tents, in the middle of Grand Court, in the bathrooms, etc. Nobody got bitten (they’re actually pretty mild-natured), and since I have no problems with spiders I thought they were pretty neat. After everybody finally went to bed, I stayed up and watched the rain fall and witnessed the *second* ‘interesting’ part of my vigil: the owls. A pair of some sort were nesting in a dead tree about 30 feet from my tent; they had one nestling, and the poor things spent the rest of the night feeding it something (mice? frogs?) one after the other… The nestling would start making this horrible sort of squawking hoot, over and over; the harassed parents would fly off, and then one would come back with something to feed Junior while the other parent perched on a tree-limb and ate their *own* snack. Then Junior’d be quiet for about 10 minutes… and the whole thing would start over again. Man, and humans claim that THEIR child-care is difficult… at least humans don’t have to catch and kill prey for their kids every half-hour or so. Anyway, this went on until about dawn; so I sat for hours and hours, watching a light rain drip down and the storm-clouds move in and out (there was a full moon, and it shone through now and then) and listening to the fire sizzle and steam at me while the owls flew back and forth and damp spiders climbed over people’s tents. There were bats, too; apparently the rain didn’t bother them much at all. I had to keep the fire going, too; it’s a funny thing, but when you’re sitting out like that, keeping the fire going becomes VERY, VERY important—I was dashing around gathering firewood under the tent-porch to keep it dry, and I scared the wits out of quite a few poor spiders.

You think about a lot of things, sitting watching the fire and the rain with owls and bats. Maybe nothing very profound or wise, but you do think about a lot of stuff that no-one much considers anymore… You think a lot about time; hours are much longer when you’re waiting them out. And your priorities shift—fire’s terribly important, and staying warm. The noises outside the firelight are a lot louder than before, and it seems like the night lasts twice as long as forever.

The sky really fell out in buckets at about dawn, so the fact that I had kept the fire going became an excellent thing (I up-ended a couple of empty metal firepits over it to keep the rain mostly off the coals), and when everybody else woke up we all ended up shoveling the burning logs into a charcoal cooker and dragging it under a cement shelter to cook breakfast. Yay, bacon! Food gets awfully important too.

Heh; didn’t intend to meander like this—you just reminded me of an important deep-down memory, that’s all.