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)