BY HANNES THUM
I am writing this as the sun rises on the day of the winter solstice, the astronomical event that marks the moment when the Northern Hemisphere is angled as far away from the sun as it is pointed at any time in the year. This geometric alignment, rooted in the way that our planet’s axis has a tilt to it, also brings with it the longest night and the shortest day of the year for all residents, both human and non-human, of these northern latitudes.
Our ancestors, if you went back enough generations, would have been well aware of the cycles of lightness and darkness throughout the year, and would have very much taken note of the solstices. It might be hard for us to picture nowadays, but before the advent of ubiquitous artificial lighting and reliable home heating and readily available food shipped to us from around the world, people would have been very in touch with the harshness of the dark days of winter.
Humans are an adaptable species, but darkness has never been our friend.
We have long associated the black of night with shades of fear and danger—it’s when the sun goes down that we are at our most vulnerable. The long nights and short days of winter impose a heavy tax on our warm-blooded bodies, on our high-caloric-demand diets, and on our minds which, though tuned to be predators of some creatures, are still very much wired to fear those more able predators that have long considered us prey.
After the solstice, the days will grow longer and the nights will grow shorter in small increments—by the time these words are printed next week, our days will have already lengthened some three or four minutes. And though the majority of winter is yet to come, there is hope in the fact that we as a northern community are tilting back toward the sun.
As long as life has existed on this planet, the turning of the corner toward lengthening days and more sunshine would have been something to celebrate, indeed. Light is, after all, the basic source of energy for life as we know it.
Recently, I found myself outside after dark, far from the lights of my home and of town. We often mark the solstice with fire, burning piles of slash left over from the woodcuts of autumn—an acknowledgment of the light that will return and of the way that, even in the heart of winter’s darkness, there is energy stored in the cells of tissues grown in summer. A release of a bit of stored solar energy to remind us that the world will brighten again in time.
Above us, silently shining bright in the cold, clear night, we could see Vega, Cassiopea, and Andromeda, hanging like tiny jewels above the hills—themselves their own pinpricks of light in the darkness. Even in our modern era, the solstice reminds us of things, like the balance between darkness and light, that our lives are still dictated by.