One Minute At a Time
The Day After Solstice and the Hubris Of Imagining Anything Will Ever Stay The Same For Long
And just like that, there is more light.
It's so often like that, isn't it? Something shifts (health, attitude, energy, relationship, the proximity of the Northern Hemisphere to the sun), and suddenly, there is more of something. Space. Time. Joy. Hope.
Light.
Today, the day after the Solstice, there will be one more minute of light. Tomorrow, there will be two more minutes, and the next day, three. It's not a lot, obviously, not enough to notice day to day without science telling us it is so. But it is something.
I woke up before 6 am today. I'm sitting in my bed, tucked in the corner of a big L-shaped window with open curtains and a cozy sweater wrapped around me, pillows supporting my back. My bed is a wild jumble: velvet duvet, fur pillows and throws in all directions, and two weighted blankets grounding my legs. The engine of the city freeways is a constant distant backdrop of sound, punctuated at this hour only by steady honks from flocks of Canada Geese taking their winter holiday in the park's waterways just south of me.
The sky outside lightens, pink at the horizon, then yellow, white, and faint gray blue. Sometimes, I hear the trains running along Grand Avenue, slicing a diagonal through the city. I wait for them now, anticipation and impatience mingling in me in a way that feels like they sound plaintive and wild. They speak nostalgia and wanderlust to me, always taking me to spaces outside of time, past and future, all at once.
This is my favorite time to be awake and alive, hours that are just my own. It feels even better today because I woke with the seeds of words swirling. Rather than letting my brain wake to the predictable cadence of the constant scroll (as I do on so many quiet mornings regardless of how many times I swear I am going to stop), today, I reached for my computer with these words.
One more minute of light.
The muse is teasing now, dancing closer and twirling away, asking me to make a connection between my agonizingly slow return to writing and the relative tilt of the earth's axis in relationship to that big, fiery, sustaining ball of light. To knit together the metaphor of one minute a day being unnoticeable in the moment but carrying us into a new season. I want to find a way to weave in the paradoxical fact that the light doesn't begin to lengthen at the end of winter but at its very beginning. Or the even wilder paradox that we are closest to the sun in January and farthest in July. It will get colder still, and it will get lighter at the same time. Isn't that something?
It's so close to making beautiful sense in my still slow, good-morning brain, but I can't seem to close the circle. Maybe I won't tie it all together right now, or even try to. Perhaps this is where I lean into my relationship with you and trust you see the threads I just pulled, tug them a bit more, and weave them together for yourself. Maybe I just step back and allow you to make your own meaning of it all. Or it could be that I just keep writing to you here and stay with this a little longer, just to see where I get before I'm done. There's likely a metaphor in that idea, too, if I stay with it long enough.
One more minute of light.
So much of our experience of life is like these finite sixty-second measurements, stacking one upon the other through the interminable dark of winter until suddenly we find ourselves bursting back into the endless glory days of summer, sticky hot air alive with possibility.
It's just 1 degree per day, you know. The tilt of the earth's axis remains stable year-round, but we move from winter to spring to summer to autumn and back again on an average of just under one degree of tilt relative to the sun each day.
It takes so little to change everything.
Don't worry. This essay isn't going to wind itself into some pithy treatise about how small actions can create big results. I wouldn't play you dirty like that. I could never write a line like I did above without acknowledging how that same metaphor works for destruction and endings just as much as it does for building and beginnings.
Slowly, slowly, and then all at once.
The light comes, it builds, and it leaves again. Love comes, it builds, and it leaves again. So, too, joy, adventure, and peace. The same goes for the muse and my access to the words, as desperate as I feel to have access to them always. So, too, for life itself.
It's all cyclical, transitory. Here, then gone, then here again. That, on its own, is not the problem. It's not depressing, hopeless, or pessimistic. It is just is. The natural world has always operated on such principles, and as much as we like to pretend otherwise, we are a part of the natural world. The blood and guts and bones of us prove it. The way we rely on the soil and her bounty to survive proves it. Animals, we are, every last one. No less subject to seemingly invisible and imperceptible changes like one degree of relative tilt and one more minute of sunlight than the birds, the fungi, the tides.
It's our insistence on pretending permanence that twists us.
The good. The bad. The heavy and hard and grief-soaked days? We think they are forever. The rush and lust and head over heels of falling? We think those days are forever, too. The prideful high of doing yoga every day, not eating carbs, not fighting with your partner, keeping your house white glove clean, or finally, for once, getting caught up on your bills? Once it is, it should remain.
The gutted on the floor at 3 am, clawing the demon of loss from your body? The extra pounds once the daily yoga stopped? The lousy relationship, messy house, mounting debt? Once here, it will never leave.
The muse vanishes, and my words disappear into the abyss. I imagine that will last forever.
The words return, and I'm staying up late to get them out onto the page? Also forever.
Pure hubris is what it is. And so damn fucking human of us. We imagine what comes will stay. We imagine what leaves will never return. In reality, while the tilt of our axis may remain relatively stationary, we are spin-spin-spining around the sun, objects in constant motion even when we appear at rest.
What could possibly remain stagnant when you consider all that is moving every second of our lives? Even that stationary axial tilt (also known by the beautiful term obliquity, which I cannot keep from saying over and over again this morning, letting my tongue move around it’s form) is in a long, slow process of oscillation, a 0.47-arcsecond decrease per year over about 41,000 years until it starts building again.
Forty-one thousand years, ya'll. To shift 2.4 degrees. God damn, that makes one more minute of light per day seem absolutely speedy.
My point in all of this? It all changes. Every last thing. More slowly than we can possibly imagine and more quickly than we can predict. And that is, in some ways, entirely terrifying. But my god, the freedom of it. The hope. The possibility. The lungs full of air unknowing of what may come. Of what is in the works that we cannot possibly observe or understand. Of what will enter and what will leave, and what will return.
Millimeter by millimeter. Degree by degree. Minute by minute. Impossible to see until it is impossible to ignore. Always and forever in a state of flux.
We humans are obsessed with freezing moments in time, keeping things the same as they were. Even the Latin etymology of the word Solstice means "sun stands still."
Of course, we now know that nothing stands still. It's only an apparent pause (like that moment when you were a kid on a swing set and hit the top of the trajectory where you were suspended in space and time for a fraction of a heartbeat) before it switches the whole thing up and reverses direction entirely on the shortest day and longest night of the year.
And what do we get for that extraordinary change of direction?
Just one more minute of light.
Now go ahead and tell me you don't feel the shift already, and tell me that's not everything.
Blown into the stratosphere, as always. Just, wow.