Time

Religions celebrate their particular predilections during the Winter Solstice. They overlay symbol on symbol over ancient nature rites of our more remote ancestors, who really lived in nature, not against it. The tinsel and electric lighting are distractions, more defenses against the obvious shortness of daylight in the Northern Hemisphere and the parallel shortness of life, as each annual cycle of seasons marks time lost. We are indeed creatures of time and gravity. The same light that gives us birth, oxidizes our bodies over time. The same gravity that gives us air, pulls our spines to the ground with age. I walked my mother to my car yesterday after a small family gathering. She is 85. And I was visited by a striking flashback of walking my grandmother to a car after a similar gathering forty years ago. My mother was younger then than I am now. And yesterday, my mother could have been my grandmother of those four decades past. This is my Winter Solstice gift from the Universe: This deep realization and understanding that I am turning with the Wheel of Time with everyone and everything else. This is the nature of this planet in the Universe. By accepting that into my interior universe, I achieve a great peace.