Sun, standing
In this episode, we explore a natural cycle and how it can become a metaphor for social change
Today it’s the solstice: literally, sun, standing. Up in the north, where you’re more likely to live, it’ll be midwinter; for us down here in south, it’s midsummer day, the sun almost straight upward, high in the sky, blazing bright.
It isn’t actually standing still, of course: it’s always moving, swinging across the sky each day, and up and down throughout the year. (As seen only from our perspective, though: the sun itself isn’t moving at all, other than at a scale far larger than we can easily see. But that’s a different story…)
The ‘sun, standing’ bit relates to the annual cycle in which the highest point that the sun reaches at midday varies throughout the year. It isn’t relevant to those in tropics, but for those of us who live further north or south from that mid-range, it determines the length of our sunlit day. Here down south, this solstice is our ‘longest day’, the point where we start heading back towards the dark of winter; for those in the north, it’s midwinter day, the turning-point towards the light - and in turn also why the year-end and its various festivals take place right now.
(It’s a bit misleading, though, because in practice it’s more like the start of the hardest part of winter, or summer, rather than the middle of it. But yes, it is the point at which the length of day begins to turn the other way: midwinter or midsummer in that sense at least.)
The sun seems to ‘stand’ in the sense that the change in direction is almost imperceptible at first. The furthest reach of a pendulum, where it’s slowed, slowed, slowed, to an apparent breathless stop; and then, just as slowly, turns to fall the other way. This is in stark contrast to what happens at the equinoxes, the centre-points in the cycle, where the length of day is changing so fast that it’s hard to notice that day and night are briefly in balance.
Yet all of this also suggests some useful metaphors for the human realm as well. I’ve touched on this in previous episodes here, such as ‘Midwinter’ and ‘Equinox’, yet we can it in another direction here…
At a global scale, we seem to be at a tipping-point. Not just for climate-change - it’s probably already too late for that - but at a sociopolitical level, as the faults and now-inevitable failings of our current ‘economics’ and other institutions are being laid bare in a way that can no longer be ignored.
And right as that’s happening, more than half of the world’s still somewhat-functioning democracies will undergo new elections this year.
Much like this subtle moment of sun, standing, but also different in its own way, there’s a choice here, sitting right on the knife-edge.
On the one side, acknowledge the complexities we face, and take the courage to do what we must, if we’re to have any chance of future survival: namely, to dismantle the entirety of the possession-economy, and fully replace it in every way with a responsibility-based one. Going that way will be hard - no doubt about that - but, again, it’s the only viable option that we have.
On the other side, we have the lure of the would-be authoritarians, paediarchs and other narcissistic covert-crybabies, with their beguilingly-simplistic answers to complex problems - typically, by finding some arbitrarily-chosen ‘Other’ to blame for everything - and their strident calls to ‘Make Our-Chosen-Bit-Of-The-World Great Again’ by trying to revert to a past that no longer exists, cannot exist any more, and was never really viable in the first place, if it ever existed at all. At a time when we need to adapt fast to a fast-changing future, choosing that option has a very high risk of killing us all. Not A Good Idea…
But it’s not just our choice: it’s other people’s choice too. Billions upon billions of them: massively malinformed, misinformed, disinformed - and often intentionally so as well. Oh well.
And yet, like this moment of sun, standing, all we know right now is this moment of indecision, uncertainty - the still-point before everything starts to change. And yes, no matter how much we might want to know right now which way the world will turn, we can’t. By this time next year, at the next same solstice, yes, we’ll know: but until then, we’ll have to wait.
(Apologies that this episode has been so late: unfortunately, I’ve been ill for most of the past week, nothing major, but enough to keep me in my bed, unable to think straight and get any writing done. I should be back on track again for next week’s episode - and in the meantime, Happy Chaos to you all!)