SOLSTICE

Long day, short night, summer's here!

evening on the 20th

evening on the 20th

morning on the 21st

SOL-STICE

sunset, december 21, 2011, from our porch in woodland hills

Today the sun-stands still (sol-stice) after having wandered south for six months. Tomorrow it will start moving north again. That's good news for all of us who get SAD this time of year.

http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/ua/SunAndSeasons.html

This figure from a Weber State site shows what's up:


Lots more information at the site (click on the caption).


Seasonal sadness doesn't seem to be a new thing. Alignments of standing stones set up thousands of years ago mark the point the sun will reach before finally starting to come back. 


The photo below shows the southernmost reach of the sun, right at the top of Santaquin Mountain. Moving to the left, as the sun now will do, it will slide down the mountain, climb the peak with the microwave tower, and descent down into the next dip before June 21.

sunrise, day after the solstice

I spent a couple of weeks one summer traveling from Land's End to the Orkney Islands, visiting standing stones and thinking about why we stand up stones. There are burial sites and fertility sites as well as the astronomical sites, so the answers are multiple.


In honor of this year's solstice, some photos from that trip (much better ones all over the internet; but these are mine and thus memoryladen):

Avebury

Avebury

Stonehenge: No Access to Stone Circle!

Standing Stones of Stenness (Orkney Islands)

Ring of Brogar (Orkney Islands)

And the most phallic of them all! The Devil's Arrows

Addendum

The Flowerville blogger's response to the photos took me back to the notebook I had with me on the trip. A couple of images scanned from the book I left in a London cinema near the end of the trip, after seeing Wim Wenders' Bis ans Ende der Welt, and then retrieved, gratefully!, hours later):

Standing Stones of Stenness

Ring of Brogar

What Remains of my Orkney Lunch

Finally, a poem of George Mackay Brown's, recommended by flowerville:


A Work for Poets


To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A ship
A star
A cornstalk


Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read


That not far from the stone
A well might open for wayfarers


Here is a work for poets --
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence


And a poem by my friend Leslie Norris, may he rest in peace, about poetry and life and the cromlech in the photo above (note the 12 stanzas -- *sta-nzas):

“The Twelve Stones of Pentre Ifan”

The wind

Over my shoulder

Blows from the cold of time.

It has

Shaped the hill,

It has honed the rock outcrops

With the

Granules of its

Rasping.  When the old ones

Were born

They dropped in dark-

ness, like sheep, and hot animals

Howled for

The afterbirths.

I watch the great stones of

Faith they

Moved in the flickering

Mountains of their nameless

Lives, and

See once more the

Points of adjusted rock, taller

Than any

Man who will ever

Stand where I stand, lifting their hope

In still,

Huge stone, pointed

To the flying wind.  The sea ebbs again

And round

The endless brevity

Of the seasons the old men’s cromlech

Prepares

Its hard shadows.

The four great stones, elate and springing,

And the

Smaller stones, big

As a man, leaning in, supporting.

                        Leslie Norris (Walking the White Fields: Poems 1967-1980)

Summer Solstice

From the vantage point of our house, we can see mountain ranges to the east and to the west, their silhouettes perfect for solstice alignment.

The top two photos are from last night, the bottom two from this morning. All show the sun's northernmost range as seen from here.

The second photo shows the long path (to the left of the setting sun) the sun has followed since the winter solstice, when it set up the hill to the left, farther to the left than the photo shows.

The third photo shows the same path since the winter solstice, this time to the right. We've watched the sun progress down into dips and then up to the mountain top and now down into a second dip over the past six months.

Abundant light, the most we'll have this year, ought to be celebrated with friends, and perhaps tonight with a dark imperial Russian stout called "Outer Darkness."

Because this is the day the sun will "stand" still (sol-stice), because it takes a while to gather speed again to wander south, there have been and will be several days of long sunlight to celebrate.

December 21-June 21

Winter Solstice to the Summer Solstice. When your state of mind depends on sunlight, when depression lurks in the darkness, when natural sunlight is your friend, you pay careful attention to the length of the days. And today, as opposed to the day the sun set in the first photo, or the day halfway between, was the year's longest.

Solstice Sunset vs the End of January

Winter Light, Starting with the Solstice Sunset

And ending with a sunset a week later, already creeping north.

Equinoctial Thoughts

It's a little over a week till the autumnal equinox, but the sun is now rising in the notch to the south of the mountain to the east of us, having climbed, since June 21, up and over the mountain from the notch on its northern end, and with the storm blowing in today, the sky is dark and the windchimes busy.

Yesterday, cleaning up a pit I had lined with douglas fir posts left over from building our house, I decided to stand them in a line marking the summer solstice. If you look along the posts in this photo, you can locate the spot on Lake Mountain where the sun quits moving north, stands still for an instant (sol-stice), and then moves south for the winter.

Why does that matter to me? I suppose it matters for the same reason it mattered to everyone who has marked the solstice, whether through standing stones, marks inside rock formations, or whatever means. We are affected by movements of the sun. Short days mean, for me, a return to more depressive moods. I compensate for that, at best, with thoughts of backcountry skiing.

The wind will blow my posts over, balanced on their ends as they are, the seasons will progress as they always have, and I, now in my 60th year, will follow the seasons as long as I can and then follow the posts.