Black Mountain

Lake Tomahawk July 24, 2024

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

A very happy yule to you!!

 Today is winter solstice. Here in eastern US it occurs when the earth starts tilting back the other direction toward the sun at 4:48 pm EST.

I always love standing still, feeling gravity and all it's power, and thinking the earth keeps on turning, but somehow it stops its tilt like a top and turns the other way. There's a moment with tilt stop. That seems so incredible to my scientific mind.

But also my emotional intuitive self is dancing for the joy of less darkness and more light, which is of course the main feature of the earth leaning more southerly from it's north pole. 

And so all these winter festivals also celebrate the returning of the light! In many manifestaions. Son and sun. Burning the yule log, and composting the leavings from our own dinners (no that's not a fesitval - yet)

Today's quote:

The year finally turns
Pirouetting en pointe
The dancer meets the dance
And we are renewed
Halloed hollow
We will hold a space
A dark space
An empty place
Cupped between hands
Hidden between breaths
Lost between heartbeats
Harroed from soul-falls
We will hold a space
For the coming of the light
We breathe in
The moment has come
To hold our breath within our heart
Silence
While the light becomes so still
We can hear the tiny cracks as dawn breaks
This moment the light has travelled far
And pauses breathless
Before starting that slow return
The moment passes, as always
And we breathe out
Giving thanks to the sweet sacred dark
Welcoming the light

I'm sorry, when I cut/pasted this, the author's name was lost. If you know who wrote it, please let me know.




21 comments:

  1. ...personally I'm excited that the days will slowly get longer!

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  2. Yes! What i feel is the stirring underground. The Oak King returns, and unseen by us the slow awakening will start. For a gardener, this is the excitement of this day. But what you said about the tilt of the earth, whoa. I never thought about that!

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    1. Love thinking of the Oak King. Definitely the ground and earth are alive, just waiting.

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  3. Happy Winter Solstice. Enjoy the return of the sun!

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    1. Thanks, and I hope the earth stays settled down where you are. Simple season changes are quite enough!

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  4. The sun is hanging in the south all day soon to start moving north again. Nice to see the sun this cold day.

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    1. I have enjoyed seeing it when I could too. Rain and maybe freezing on the ground tonight. So I went to get some essentials about an hour ago, with everyone else and his dog.

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  5. Happy Winter Solstice. I will enjoy the return of light, less darkness . Have a wonderful holiday week, Merry Christmas!

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    1. Thanks Eileen. It will be so nice to have more sunshine...or at least more hours of daylight, slowly but surely. Happy Christmas to you and yours.

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    1. Thank you very much, this old elf is enjoying today immensely!

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  7. We are going through this again, are we? Sigh. The earth never changes its tilt.

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    1. Look it up. The earth is round, The earth rotates on its axis. The axis changes its relationship to the eliptical orbit around the sun slowly and constantly twice a year.

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    2. Hah. You may be understanding or not but expressing it poorly. The tilt never changes, It is always the same 23,5 degrees. The way you express it, I am led to think that the earth changes its tilt. It doesn’t. The angle stays the same against the plane of the ecliptic. As the earth goes around the sun, at this time of year the Southern Hemisphere receives the direct rays. In summer the opposites occurs but not because the earth changes its orientation.

      BTW, you may be mixing it up. The earth rotating on its axis gives is day and night. The earth revolving around the sun gives us the seasons.

      To repeat: you may be understanding it correctly but just saying it so that it doesn’t seem like you do. Anyway, here is a short video just in case. https://youtu.be/WgHmqv_-UbQ

      Not that this really matters. I am just clarifying because I thought we had covered this a few years ago and you seemed to get it then. I have taught this in school. I used to walk around the classroom holding the globe while a student would point the overhead projector at me. That physical demonstration seemed to work.

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    3. THanks AC...not sure stil how the earth can stay tilted at the same angle to it's orbit, but somehow receive sunlight differently. I guess I'm glad to know it's tilt doesn't change after all. A bit of an assumption on my part. So / is the tilt in winter and / is the tilt in summer, from the angle of the orbit.

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    4. Hey AC...my visual way of learning would certainly have appreciated you walking around with a globe and a spot light. Let me see if I've got it yet. The angle always points the same direction as the earth rotates daily, and as it moves along it's orbit of the sun. So when the angle has the bottom of the globe pointed to the sun, it's summer in the southern hemisphere. And moving a quarter of the way around the orbit, the angle still points the same direction, but now the sides (north and south) of the earth get equal amounts of light from the sun...thus either spring or fall. And when it ends up on the opposite side from where we started...the bottom of the globe is now pointed away from the sun at the same angle, with the top getting more light...thus northern hemisphere has summer. I can't believe it's designed this way. I really liked my theory!! Maybe some other planet somewhere...

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  8. Yeah. I think you’ve got it. The tilt is constant, but as we revolve around the sun the relationship is different (hard to express). Take your left hand and put it on the right side of your head with the bottom (wrist) tilted toward you and the top ( fingers) pointed away. Bring you hand around front to your left side without changing how your hand is tilted. Now your fingers are pointed toward your head while the wrist is pointed away.

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    1. What works best for me (those hands and wrists left me all tangled up)...is to see the eliptical plane as just that...like a plastic form that the earth travels on...and to imagine the tilt as the earth's feet and head. Always tilted the same, but as it moves on that invisible plastic plane, the feet will move in relation to the sun, sometimes pointed toward it, sometimes away from it.

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So glad to have your comments...whatever they may be. I'm one who likes to reply sometime or another, so others will see that; or you might happen back sometime and see what conversation might have started.