Celestial Stories

As I write this, it is exactly 5:02 on December 21^st, 2020. Winter solstice. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day of the year is finally here. It’s caused by the angle of the earth’s axis and the consequent angle of the sun’s rays as we stand here on the surface of this spinning chunk of rock and water. Today the sun’s elevation above the horizon will be the lowest of the year.

Though the coldest months are still to come, the days will now begin to grow longer. Slowly at first, then comes the lengthening of the lengthening—accelerating till we reach a maximum of around two minutes of extra daylight every day. I’m already wondering how I should spend my coming treasure trove of minutes. One might think that two minutes isn’t a long time, but don’t be fooled.

These days, my sense of time seems rather erratic. On the one hand it feels like I’ve been in some kind of lockdown for years. On the other, I can’t believe Christmas comes on Friday. Where did the month go? Where did the year go?

Last night, a friend gave a lovely Zen talk that featured the image of erratic boulders. These large standing rocks are the ones dropped onto the New England landscape 22,000 years ago by the glacier that then covered this whole region. They had been picked up further north as the glacier carved the valleys and shaved the mountains on its southward journey. Then, as the ice melted, these stones of sometimes great proportion were left like travelers stranded in a foreign country with no means of return.

But how could travelers be stranded for such a long time? Maybe they lost their wallet and your passport. Maybe they couldn’t speak the language. Or maybe the foreign country was an island and all the boats were sunk and the airport was destroyed. The local inhabitants had had enough of all of this coming and going—were tired of exchange rates and the globalization of their traditional jobs—decided they didn’t want to be part of the world-wide-web or any other webs of commerce, intrigue and deceit.

Maybe everyone was going native, just as you happened to arrive. And since you had always hoped to lose everything anyway, you decided to join in. You finally gave up on the person you were and decided to join in the insurrection of disconnection. Slowly you learned the beautiful language of where you were. You found friends and learned to fish and grew a few vegetables in a small plot by your kitchen door. (I’m now thinking that your island was off the coast of Greece and the weather was nearly always perfect.) Or maybe you just became a storyteller and entertained the next generation with tall tales of the mythical world across the waters. You walked a lot, were happy to work hard and enjoyed the rest of your days on the island.

Now that would be erratic.

But last night, my friend, who had never, to my knowledge, been stranded on such as island as described above, told all of us who were webbing together on Zoom Zen that the word erratic comes from the Latin root erraticus which means wandering and also mistake or error. Certainly we are all wanderers living lives that, as one Zen teacher put it, are one mistake after another. We find ourselves deposited in this moment of time at this particular place. We don’t really know where we came from and the sheet of ice, or whatever it was that brought us here, has long since disappeared. So we make up stories. My father was of royal parentage but I was born in humble circumstances. There was a big star that was really two planets, but that’s just incidental. It’s a long story and with an R-rated ending. (graphic violence)

Believing the story or not, this will still be the shortest day of the year. We are all stranded here on the shores of present—carried here by vast depths of time beyond comprehension. We do our best to learn the beautiful language of this true place, but the syntax is hard and the subtle sounds nearly indiscernible.

And all the while this blue-green pearl of a planet twirls on its imagined axis as it hurtles through space—held in the magnificent thrall of a burning orb. I’m reminded of the ancient Native American song: ‘Why do I go about pitying myself, when all the time I am being carried on great winds across the sky?’