Solstice: Back to the Source

In every culture that observes it, the winter solstice--whether the celebration goes under the name of Ramadan, Christmas, Hanukkah, Yalda, or some other--is a time of thanksgiving. You have made it through the time of shortening days and dwindling light. From this point on, the light increases; you have arrived at the dawn of a new year.

So people, and probably even animals in their own way, give thanks at this time to the universe for the gifts of life and nourishment. This, in essence, is what the winter solstice is about, the common thread of meaning that runs through all these disparate religions and cultural observances.

There really is no need for more than this, because Nature and her transformations are quite spectacular and exciting enough on their own, without the need for human-centered myths and fables. Living beings, touching the earth and one another in gratitude and wonder, at a recurring moment of one such transformation.

You can and will, of course, add your own unique perspective and practice to this season, and that will make it your holiday, rather than the property of the Church or some other institution. Just begin with Nature and let nothing in between you and her; the rest will arise effortlessly from that connection between your heart and its source.

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The artwork in the little card attached is from my blogging partner, Terry McKenna, who will be back in this space on Tuesday morning. Happy holidays to all.

Happy Global Orgasm Solstice, From Daily rEvolution

Hey everybody, want a holiday on which there can be no "war"? Something that everyone—even Bill O'Reilly—can celebrate in their own way, alone or with significant other(s)? Here it is, today: welcome to Global Orgasm Day. Yep, and now you know what G-O-D really means!

Kind of makes you want to ignore the rest of the news. But duty also calls: Remember the Pfizer ad we posted a little while back, here? Well, check out what the geniuses at Pfizer had to choke up for their ex-CEO:

McKinnell's package, which the company disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday, totals more than $180 million. It includes an estimated $82.3 million in pension benefits, $77.9 million in deferred compensation, and cash and stock totaling more than $20.7 million.

So make a note of whichever of the big P's products you're buying these days (and that's just the OTC stuff), and see if you can choose something else. I can't imagine trusting the health of my innards to a bunch of morons who would fork over $180M to some smarmy corporate con artist. Meanwhile, somebody get me a soma.

Now, to the really big news of the day. If you want to see the title of Book 7 of the Harry Potter series, click and drag over the white space between the lines below. But if you'd like to find out for yourself, go to Ms. Rowling's site, click the eraser, and start the journey. Hint: you'll know you're almost there when you start feeling like Saddam. I'll give you until after the holiday to check it out, and next week we'll start to consider what it all might mean.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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Friday Reflection

Whenever I begin to suspect that all the truly great writers are all dead, I pick up one of this lady's works. Our banner quote for the week (reproduced below) is from Holy the Firm, a tiny masterpiece (it's all of 76 pages long) from 1977.

The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we're all victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for the people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can—and will—do?

If you have a cell of poetry in your being (you've got plenty more than that, whether you're aware of it or not), this book is worth reading, and then reading again. Many of you probably know Dillard from a truly diamond-like book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In books like Pilgrim and Holy, you can hear the singing of a unique voice of our time, a voice of whom none less than Eudora Welty wrote, "A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled..."

Let's have another selection from Holy The Firm, in which she comically compresses this Aristotelian notion of a primum materia:

These are only ideas, by the single handful. Lines, lines, and their infinite points! Hold hands and crack the whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung. And cry down the line to his passing white ear, "Old Sir! Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its hole? O Old! Where is your other hand?" His right hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm.

I think it was Joseph Campbell who once said that writers, poets, and artists are the leaders of every age's most transformative cycles, the beacons to every bloodless revolution. I can sense such a voice in Annie Dillard, who teaches us that the artist is simply the medium for something else, whose name is elusive, personal, and infinite:

How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.

A Note to My Brainstem

Unless you're Bill O'Reilly, fighting pretend wars, or just tend to be depressed this time of year (quite understandable), the holidays are supposed to feature laughter and jollity. Nobody's better at that than our friends across the pond; so click the graphic and have a Merry Mithras laugh with Stephen Fry (of Harry Potter audiobook fame) and crew.

I can't claim to have known about this study while I was writing "God's Nose" over the weekend, but it's nice to know that my work can be topical, even though by accident.

Today, I happened to have a glance back at the DR archives, just to see what we were up to last year. I had actually forgotten the transit strike here in NYC, but that was the big event here one year ago. I can't recall what made me do the "Baghdad Bob and Crawford George" piece.

It's a holly-jolly season, after all: the roundball thugs are having their usual brawls; the battle over the O.J. / Fox debacle continues apace; and the latest statistics on violence in Iraq are...well...exactly what we all knew they would be.

So let me suggest, Bill-O, that the war is not on Xmas; it's just around it. Why this is so is anyone's guess, but my astrologer friend Eric Francis has a theory:

I recognize that the holidays are a difficult time of year for many, if not most, people -- myself included. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's also a somewhat frightening time of year, as the cave-person or primate part of our brains is indeed wondering where the Sun went and whether it will ever come back (note to brainstem, it will).

Perhaps the solstice time is, after all, a moment for giving the forebrain a well-earned rest and affording some primacy instead to nose, brainstem, and heart. This is a theme I found in Harry Potter's first solstice moment:

The cloak is a Christmas gift—one of the first of Harry's life, since he was never given any by the Dursleys—which comes to him from his dead father through his mentor, Dumbledore: the unsigned note which accompanies the cloak only says, "your father left this in my possession before he died. It is time it was returned to you. Use it well." The invisibility cloak is a magical (and therefore metaphorical) object of immense value and beauty: it is "fluid and silvery gray…strange to the touch, like water woven into material." Clearly, Mrs. Rowling is not writing this in a vacuum of invention: this is a metaphor of great historical depth and psychological meaning, particularly within the mythology of England and Ireland:

In the story Tochmarc Etaine (The Courtship of Etain), the god of the Otherworld, Midir, demands in compensation for the loss of an eye in a brawl, a chariot, a cloak, and the most beautiful maiden in Ireland as his bride…This was a cloak of invisibility (like Siegfried's tarnkappe in the Nibelungenlied) and of forgetfulness…The god Lug wore a similar cloak which enabled him to pass through the entire Irish army without being seen when he came to aid his son…To put on the cloak is to show that you have chosen Wisdom (the philosopher's cloak). (Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, pp. 205-206)

The invisibility cloak is an image of transformation, and not of self-obliteration, depersonalization, or disembodiment. For Harry, his body is still manifestly there—he can feel it, and so can others if they bump into him (indeed, this is part of the challenge in using the cloak). Whenever he wears the cloak over the course of the five stories, Harry's physical and intuitive senses seem to become more acute and penetrating: he becomes more open and alert to experience than when he is visible. The cloak's virtue is to take him to, and through, the experiences that will contribute to his inner growth—indeed, it is an active metaphor of the practices involved in the development of the true self. These include inner movements of one's total being—the intuitive, feeling, and spiritual capacities of our nature, that live and glow in quiescence beneath the often-repressive monarch known as intellect.

Harry discovers this the first time he uses the cloak: he goes to the library, thinking that this is where he "should" go, in order to obtain information. But he quickly discovers that he is being called beyond the realm of "should" and "ought," once he has put on this cloak—that he is being called to penetrate deeper regions of the psyche than he can reach through the symbols and instruments of intellect. This message is brought to him very quickly: the library is said to be "pitch-black and eerie"; the books "didn't tell him much," because they are written in "words in languages Harry couldn't understand." Finally, he comes to a book that screams into the night as soon as he opens it, and that drives him out of there, toward the place where a more potent image of self-discovery lies, which will engage his entire being. In his retreat from the images of intellect and the representatives of Authority (the caretaker Argus Filch and Professor Snape, who come looking for him), Harry encounters exactly what he needs to further his inner learning: the Mirror of Erised.