Solstice

The solstice is nearly upon us - the cold, damp, foggy drizzly wetness. The blurred lights through darkened windows, and blurred lights on the wet ground. Mirrors of wetness and mirrors of exhaustion. The darkness, closing in, just before it releases us - whisperings of strange, inexplicable greyness etched in our memories, half hidden worlds which lie just beyond that melt and fade, when we try to bring them into the heat.

I live amongst people and I watch them scurry - celebrating - something. Trying to convince themselves, in their panic, that the lights will return. They festoon electric strings from cornice to cornice, buzzing in equal quantities of hope and delusion, for really, no matter what we do, the light will return. It will return. Tomorrow will happen. The future is forever there, staring at us, with its unblinking eye, the unforgiving glare at the end of the tunnel.

Like ants during a flood, as the waters rise, we desperately move things to the higher ground, we fetch and we send, we erect and dismantle, frantically rearranging the furniture while all the time keeping on eye on the inexorable, the inevitable - the impending end to the distractions from the darkness which had once threatened to engulf us.

Decorate, decorate, cook, bake, clean, buy, buy, buy - and buy some more. Stand in queues, sit in traffic. Scurry with bags, and more bags. Try to make sense of the gestures we imitate, the glyphs of tradition and consumption in equal measure which inform us in some secret way to act as creatures, driven by instinct to head over cliffs, onto beaches, into the centre of deserts to never find our way back again, until it all peters out into a whimper that sees the year's excess end up in so much landfill.

Then, we awaken, into the new year. The solstice has passed. The spell is broken and we look about ... it is a wasteland of silence and loss.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih    shantih    shantih