Solstice

Perhaps this is the time to let go of regrets and doom. The time to shelve doubts and deny fear and anger the right to rule me. Perhaps, as the year's midnight passes, I can rise from my personal deep and begin to climb toward the light.

How the seasons shape us in these temperate latitudes. Moods swinging with the tilt of the earth. Hope darkening to despair as the days shorten.

It would be good to believe in shoots of recovery. Budding optimism. Ha. A few months before I really see that reflected in my world.

I reflect on how my views and passions expand to earth-sized and shrink to robin-sized. How I embrace a kind of universality and a genus of specificity simultaneously.

I consider how nothing that I believe has any real foundation. All ethics, all thought, even all mathematics and logic, are founded untimately on matters of faith.

There is nothing we can know. All science rests on the kinds of questions beings like us might ask. All further questions rely on the knowledge that those questions have elucidated.

What questions would an oak ask? A crow? A badger?

Given scepticism and doubt, what then? Love. I think. And try to laugh.

My seasonal celebration is both tree-sized and robin-sized.

I will start with the tree.

On my damp trot, I was summoned by a tree. I was ambling up a track and the tree just said, "Come to me." And so I did.

This tree has the most graceful canopy. I felt how I was contained. In a sanctuary. I thought of how people were safe from killing inside churches. And I looked up to see a goldcrest, our tiniest bird, foraging on a branch and I felt... what complete grace it is to be a safe home. The branches reach down, this intertwining lattice of strength denying gravity. A dance that seems still to creatures in our time frame, but really is a dance in the lifetime of trees. There is a burr or growth on the trunk, a handle of sorts. The tree's signature?

I asked what the tree had to teach me. And the sense was "protection". It felt like a moment of grace.

As I sat there, the birds settled back into song. Robin, song thrush, blue tit, goldcrest and meadow pipit.

But, of course, when I stood up to record... most were silent... only the robin...

As for the robin-sized celebration... this is us.