Yule pondering

Dec. 25th. Temperature a mere minus 5°C.
So calm, so bright. Gorgeous blue sky, white all over the ground, bright white clouds. The best thing - I can see sky from every room in my place, unlike when I lived in Vancouver, every window of my place covered up by hideous huge shaggy photon-sucking trees, and that horrible never-ending thick cloud layer beyond.

I swear I could feel the very second solstice came and went, at 11:11 AM my time, Saturday, 21st.
I felt like a weight dropped away.

Today, the day everyone else gets excited about, is completely beside the point to me, as yet another year circles the drain, takes from Dec 21 to Jan 1 to carry away everything about that year that needs carried away, as by a culturally agreed upon cosmic vacuum.

Really, it's all about the light coming back. For me.

In an other hour or so I'll have to put on some respectable clothing ( I can't wear pyjamas) and go over to my mother's house, hang out, try to be social with an aunt and a cousin. It will feel like suspending freedom for a little while, but it's OK though - she's almost 90, and the way life goes, one of these years she won't be around anymore to fuss and bustle over making a christmas party. When that happens, I'll probably have all the rest of my own christmases to myself, to luxuriate in all the light, blue sky, and white snow that I can see out the window to my heart's content.

The plan is, I'll take my laptop over so that we can all sit down and identify relatives long deceased, photos of whom were put up on facebook by another cousin. My mother has procured a password from a neighbour so that we can do this project. She doesn't use a computer herself.
She is very important to this project, as she is the last sibling standing of five originals. As the oldest member of a shrunken clan, most of whom lived and died in the US, she is the most likely to be able to remember who all these people are/were. Their names at least.

.....

This morning as I worked on an image in photoshop (a picture of quadratus lumborum, of all

My little art effort

things), I listened to Handel's Messiah on CBC.  Once upon a time, long long ago, I was in a big choir for a year, and we sang the whole thing. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. So frilled and repetitious. Why people still stand up for the hallelujah chorus to this day just because some king stood up back in the 1700's when he heard it, puzzles me.

I became curious and looked up the words online. Really, if I were the king, I wouldn't likely have stood, because the whole thing seems a bit subversive: some baby is born who is killed and then comes back and now will take over the world. Maybe the king stood up because his butt was sore from sitting for so long listing to such repetitious music and singing. The king may well have thought, let the peasants believe any nonsense they want; as long as I run the army and collect the taxes, all the world are belong to me - I don't have to worry about some conceptualized idealized "king" who stands for perfect justice and mercy and love and end to war. Heck, I've worked hard to be where I am. So let them be happy in their little fantasy.

I will never stand up again for that song. I will never go out to hear it live. It's a travesty. The world is not much different 300 years after the fact. People are still fighting and killing each other over imaginary kings and ideas associated with them.

Really, all we need is sunshine for ourselves and kindness for each other. Not as an idea, but as an everyday action.