Solstice/some outlooks are brighter

Sunrise on Kumo’s Pond, from my bedroom window / the sun sets on Little Averill Pond, VT

This post drops at 4:20 am on December 21, the time of solstice in Vermont—the moment when night loosens its dark hold and bows to the power of light.

“To celebrate the solstice is to celebrate the miracle of our survival amid the cold reality of space,” wrote Jason Anthony in “Field Guide to the Anthropocene,” a Substack site that admirably blends hard science and warm beauty. Subscribe here.

Here’s a bit more of what he had to say:

“A solstice is less an event than an imagined pause, a moment as quiet as the shift between tides.

“Like the sea at its full ebb, here in the north the Sun seems to stop … in its long declining autumnal path and, rejuvenated, begins to climb the sky again toward the distant warmth and greenery of Spring. …The days ahead, here in the north, will slowly widen at the edges, like a waking awareness, as both dawn and dusk reclaim the minutes, then hours, they've lost over the past six months.”

And to bring us back down to earth, from an email by Rachael Grossman: “Hope you are finding light in both the very real darkness of the short days (soon to get longer) and the less tangible darkness to come.”