Tag: hope

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冬至大如年 (Dōngzhì dà rú nián)– In China, “the winter solstice is as big as the new year.”

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 21st, 2022

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Back about 500 BCE, some 250 years before Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth using nothing more than two sticks planted about 250 miles apart, a Chinese savant named Zhougfong, using nothing more than a stick in the sand, calculated Earth’s axial tilt and concluded that for the phenomenon to work, the Earth had to be a globe circling the sun at a rakish angle of 23.44 degrees. By measuring the angle of the sun at local noon each day over a year, he determined that the solstices fell six months apart on the dates we now know as December 20-22 and June 20-22. The equinoxes fell exactly halfway through the solstices, and the days and nights were equal, and the shadow of his stick ended exactly halfway through the shadows cast on the solstices.

While Chinese farmers had already doubtlessly noted the variations in the length of the day, the positions of sunrise and sunset, and the angle of the sun at noon, Zhougfong was the first known to carefully measure it and reason out the implications.

China, then as now, was a land of great seasonal variation, and the Solstices indicated the onset of deep winter and blazing hot summer. So, as with many similar places on Earth, the occasion of the Winter Solstice, the date on which the days stopped getting shorter, was marked with special celebrations and songs.

In China, the Winter Solstice is known as Dōngzhì, which can mean “Winter’s extreme” or “Winter is coming.” The Chinese take on Solstice is a bit different from most other cultures. Most note it as the date when the days begin getting longer, the sun is higher in the sky, and spring is coming. The Chinese, however, see it as the onset of the great cold and desolation of winter, something to be endured in order to anticipate spring.

Solstice marks the beginning of “The Nines of Winter.” A folk song (Shujiu) describes those stages of winter in a way that anyone from the northern lands would instantly relate to:

1st nine days, 2nd nine days, don’t take hands out of your pockets;

3rd nine days, 4th nine days, you can walk on ice;

5th nine days, 6th nine days, willows at the river’s edge start to sprout;

7th nine days, ice dissolves and water flows in the river;

8th nine days, wild geese fly back to northern areas;

9th nine days and the following days, farm cattle start to work in the field.

Despite the comparatively negative view of the Solstice, traditional Chinese belief maintains the theme of optimism that is shared throughout the West. Yin and Yang is an important concept and one strongly linked to the reversal of the decline to greater darkness. Yin energy is believed to be at its most powerful winter solstice day. But after that, as the daytime becomes longer, Yang’s energy increases, a positive influence.

While not an official holiday, it is nonetheless celebrated throughout China. It’s a time for friends and family to gather for traditional dinners of lamb dumplings and tangyuan, and is sometimes referred to as “Chinese Thanksgiving Day.” There’s more than a bit of similarity between Dōngzhì and Thanksgiving: both started as holidays celebrating the harvest. By the time of Eratosthenes, the Chinese Emperor mandated food sacrifices to show respect to the heavens and the ancestors. There was a widely held belief in the day that lamb dumplings could cure frostbite. While the science might be a bit problematic, I would be happy to tell someone my toes were a bit numb if I could get some fresh hot lamb dumplings out of it. Perhaps that’s how that notion started.

But China is a big country with wildly varying climates, and where frostbite isn’t a serious public health threat, tangyuan is popular—a rice ball leavened with sesame, red bean paste, and sweets. A China travel guide explains, “wonton is very popular in Suzhou; while mutton soup is must-eat festival food in Western and Northern China. Roasted Duck is the favorite food for People in Guangdong Province, and Jiangsu Duck, or Gingerbread Duck is popular in Xiamen.” Hmmm. Gingerbread duck. Yum.

But the theme is the same throughout China: gratitude, gatherings, respect for ancestors and elders, and quiet feasts as they hunker down for winter.

Counting the Nines is an act of hope, and by the seventh nine, the first clear signs of spring and rebirth emerge. Even the pragmatism of having to bear through the winter is leavened by that ever-rebirthing sign of humanity, hope.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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Joe’s first White House Speech — Reasonable Assurances and Sensible Warnings

Joe’s first White House Speech

Reasonable Assurances and Sensible Warnings

March 11th, 2021

Day fifty of the Biden presidency, and so far so good. Both politically and psychologically, today was a good point for Biden to stop and have a talk with the people. It came a few hours after he signed into law the biggest rebuilding act America had seen since FDR’s first 100 days. The American Rescue Act will, in the estimate of Goldman-Sachs, result in 8% annual growth over the next 12 months. That, too, is a rate of growth not seen since the 1930s. Best of all, it’s going to people and small businesses, what you could call “trickle up economics.” It will save thousands of small businesses, protect millions from hunger and homelessness. It is, as Biden once put it about the AMA, “a big fucking deal.”

In the glow from this massive legislative victory, Biden addressed the state of the country on the anniversary of the Covid pandemic.

After the past year where lies, braggadocio and delusions were all Americans got from the White House, Biden’s cautionary optimism was a gust of fresh air. Biden extolled the immense gains the vaccine program had made in the past 50 days, but didn’t try to pretend it was all his doing. (In a truly pathetic footnote, Trump put out a brief communiqué under a sort-of presidential seal, from The Office of Donald J. Trump, trying to take credit for the vaccine program.) The program has been pretty much miraculous, despite Trump. When Biden first took office, he spoke of 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days (the last day of April). That was considered a high goal, even before we learned that the outgoing administration had absolutely no plan in place for distribution or even procurement of the needed vaccines.

Now, not only are we well ahead of pace for that, but we may have vaccines available for the entire adult population by the end of May, some 500 million shots all told. The CDC is of the opinion that we’ll have herd immunity by the beginning of May, but Doctor Fauci, on the Rachel Maddow show tonight, cautioned that we are in a race against variants, and we may, even with full vaccinations, end up playing whack-a-mole (his term) with those variants, much the way we do with strains of flu and the common cold. It’s evolution, people.

Biden himself made the same cautionary note, and urged people to keep on social distancing and wearing masks for the time being, despite what the “Neanderthals” in the GOP think we should be doing. It’s not a popular request, but Biden has some courage. Things are a lot more hopeful, but we are not out of the woods. He’s right, Fauci’s right, and nearly every expert in the field is right. Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Donald Trump are all wrong, and for vicious, self-serving reasons.

Biden spoke movingly of the loss and deprivation hundreds of millions of people suffered over this past year—well over half a million dead (“more than World War I, World War II, and 9/11”), millions of families separated, millions of jobs lost. Even the most cynical of viewers had to admit that he SOUNDED sincere.

He knows, at long last, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and he just wants us not to derail ourselves by being reckless as we approach the light. It won’t stop the freedumb morons, but it might just keep enough sane people cautious enough that we might get by.

Fauci and Maddow were talking about monoclonal antibody treatments. Two studies showed respectively 87 and 89% efficacy if administered early in the course of the disease, numbers so convincing that they dropped the double blind nature of the studies on the ground that it was not moral to give half the subjects a placebo based on what is known.

This doesn’t mean that you can run out licking random seats in the New York subway knowing you just need to pop two in the mouth and you’ll be all better. The treatments are by infusion only, and still very expensive. And if you get to the point where the symptoms are life-threatening, then you’re far enough along that the treatment will be of little or any help. Fauci is hoping for a treatment that involves simple injections, or even just pills, but that’s an unknown amount of time in the future. It’s not here, and may not be here for years, but there is a cure.

Not mentioned was the spectre of “long COVID”. Roughly a third of people who become infected develop symptoms weeks or months later, even if they were completely asymptomatic to begin with. And yes, you can still be infected, even with the shots. You just are very unlikely to develop symptoms, and in the beginning, they will be mild. Nobody knows how that will affect development of “long COVID.”

Futher, variants are appearing, and while the evolutionary trend is for such variants to become both more contagious and milder (the weeding-out process of evolution means viruses that successfully inhabit live hosts will outnumber the ones that kill their hosts) that is just a trend. The mutations are individually random, and a variety of Covid could show up that is as lethal as Ebola and as communicable as measles. Worst case scenario, to be sure, but within the realm of possibility. And if we are reckless and go on acting as a culture medium for this virus, the higher the chances that something even nastier will crop up. And the more variations, the more types of vaccines are needed unless and until we can come up with an umbrella shot that can block all Covids. Note: we haven’t been able to develop a shot like that for influenza, and with the common cold, it’s pointless to even try.

Because of this, Biden’s speech was perfect for the occasion. He didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear. He told us what we needed to hear, and for most of us, that’s going to help us a lot through the coming year.

 

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Solstice 2020 — Hope always rises the next morning

December 21st, 2020

This Solstice piece, like all the others I’ve written over the past twenty years, will deal with hope, always a central theme of the Solstice. But it’s going to be a darn sight easier to write than it might have been six weeks ago, when the outlook was still unremittingly bleak. However, now we see a map to the end of the pandemic, and the end of Trump.

I think it must have felt a lot like this in the autumn of 1944, when it became clear the allies were on their way to victory both in Europe and in the Pacific. There was still a hard slog ahead, and a heavy price to be paid before the final victory, but at least victory was in sight, and the future a lot brighter.

Hope isn’t hard to come by in this dark winter. We have a vaccine. We’ve had an election. Both represent turning points, arresting a dangerous plunge to mass death and horror.

We’re not out of the woods yet, of course. It may be several months before many of us get shots, and at least six weeks before we start seeing the terrifying wave of COVID cases finally begin to break. Even with the shots, a half million people in the US alone will be dead, and millions more—perhaps tens of millions—facing a life of permanent and sometimes crippling medical problems.

I won’t relax about Donald Trump until he is out of the White House and facing trial for his many crimes. The votes have been counted and recounted, the courts have ruled dozens of times, and the few remaining sane Republicans have agreed—Biden won by a huge margin, and Trump needs to leave.

And yet Trump apparently believes he did win, as do his followers—the more ignorant ones, to be sure. He’s ordered the Pentagon not to give Biden any briefings even as the country grapples with the worst security leak in its history.

It’s quite possible that Russia controls our nuclear weapons right now, and there is a suspicion that Trump is complicit, either proactively (setting it up to happen) or reactively (knowing it happened, and doing nothing about it.) Perhaps both. In addition to his deep corruption, cruelty and incompetence, it seems likely that Trump is a gleeful traitor, destroying the country that made him possible, for tawdry profit. He’s even trying to suggest it was China on behalf of his Russian master.

There are fears generated by this despicable man, fears that living Americans have never experienced before. There’s a small but finite possibility that by this time next year, we could be in camps, or fighting for our lives and freedoms in a contrecoup. It’s been 150 years since such thoughts have been anything other than paranoid drivel, and I would love it if I read this a year from now and think of my words, “Jesus. Cut back on the coffee, man!”

What I expect to see, a month from now, is Joe Biden taking office and working hard to be a wise and just president, facing down the daunting problems left by his predecessor. I hope to see the daily count of new cases dropping day by day, and hospitals regaining the ability to handle the influx of sick and dying.

2021 will be a year of recovery. The deliberate cruelties and viciousness of the Trump regime will be reversed, and wanton executions, desecration of national parks and selling of our children and our sick to for-profit entities will abate. We will regain control of our compromised cybernet infrastructure. Eventually we might enter stores, attend parties, hug friends and family without fear of it being a death sentence. The strutting Nazis who make up outfits such as the Proud Boys will be cowering under their rocks, licking their wounds and planning for the next time society is sick enough for their opportunistic moral sickness. The vile acronyms of the Republican Party, MAGA, 6MWE, perhaps even GOP itself, will be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with other such loathsome utterances as “Got Mitt Uns” and “The People and Party are One!”

We’ll always have conspiracy theorists, of course, but by this time next year they may be back in their accustomed position of providing amusement and some puzzlement.

People are free to believe whatever damnfool notions they want, as the saying goes. But they aren’t free to make it public policy.

Chemtrails? Moon Landing Hoax? Poison Vaccines? No such thing as COVID? Your opinions, your right. You can even hold public office with nutball beliefs like those, like the idiot I’m stuck with for my Congressman. But don’t try to make them beliefs WE must live by. We have the right to tell you to go to hell—and we will!

And yes, this includes religious beliefs. Most churches are just conspiracy theories with money.

Perhaps by next year I’ll be marveling that we are in a world where food, shelter, water, clothing, medical care and education are rights, and not something to be begged for from scowling billionaires. Perhaps we’ll be on our way to a world were both billionaires and hunger no longer exist.

Yes, these are scary times. Nobody’s going to dispute that. But these aren’t end times, and history shows that the brightest sunrises happen after the longest night. It’s times like these that lead to human renaissances. Our greatest eras followed the Inquisition, the Black Plague, Civil Wars and Hitler.

I hope by next year I can write pieces, including the Solstice letter, that don’t include politics. I miss writing about Iceland and Elves, Shackleton and Exploration, and other Solstice themes. Let’s resolve to get the miserable creatures of the right off our necks so we can live free and free from fear!

We will overcome the twin plagues of COVID and Trump. We won’t only prevail; we will prosper.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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Happy Yaldā Night! – Solstice 2018

December 20th, 2018

Well, I hoped he would be in prison by now, too. But the walls are closing in, and at this point, it’s a matter of “when,” and for how long, and how many others will be in adjacent cells. He’s going down.

See? You feel hopeful already, don’t you? Well, this is the Solstice Essay, and that’s the whole point of the thing.

So let’s talk about trippy Solstice stuff.

They celebrate the winter Solstice in Iran. I was a bit surprised, because the whole place is south of 40 north, going all the way down to 21 north. While winters in the mountains of Iran can be fierce, and sometimes downright Canadian, most of the country has a fairly wide range of climate, but with fairly mild winters—no worse than, say, Tennessee. If anything, the place is known for its heat, with temperatures often well above 120 in the height of summer.

And it’s sort of equatorish. It doesn’t do midnight suns, and the long winter nights might go 14 hours instead of 20. Nobody is going to mistake it for Sweden.

The government is religious bordering on nuts, and the people are secular, bordering on sane. It suggests that celebrations, even of natural events, might have the sort of tension built in that the Christmas defenders at Faux News can only dream about. But apparently their winter Solstice is free of such. Oh—don’t let the religious police get wind of your wine and beer stash. That wouldn’t be cool.

On the night of the winter solstice, they have the Shab-e-Yaldā (“Yaldā Night”) or sometimes, Shab-e-Chelleh, “Night of Forty”. Shades of Ali-Baba! It isn’t celebrated in Ali-Baba’s home turf, Saudi Arabia, but it is big in Iran, most Kurdish regions, and most of the old Soviet breakaway -Stans.

“Chelleh” means 40, or fortieth. It’s a number that pops up pretty often in writings of the Biblical era, including, of course, the Bible. It’s generally taken to mean, “Nobody’s quite sure how long or big it was, but it was a fair old bit.” They have winter (and summer) divvied up into forty day periods, in a complicated system that suggest that their calendar scheduling was Lent to them by the Catholics. Rather than try to describe it, and thus reaffirming I have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll just quote from Wikipedia: “There are all together three 40-day periods, one in summer, and two in winter. The two winter periods are known as the ‘great Chelleh’ period (Day to Bahman,[rs 2] 40 full days), followed/overlapped by the ‘small Chelleh’ period (Bahman to Bahman,[rs 2] 20 days + 20 nights = 40 nights and days). Shab-e Chelleh is the night opening the ‘big Chelleh’ period, that is the night between the last day of autumn and the first day of winter.”

Got it? Good. Now explain it to me.

I’m enchanted with the notion of big and little 40s. I can’t help but wonder if there is a medium 40, which is maybe 38-42.

Yaldā is even more fun. It seems that back in the fifth century, a sect of early Nestorian Christians fled to Iran, escaping religious persecution. Their word for ‘birth’ was, as you might have guessed, ‘yaldā.’ Iran then, as now, had the philosophy of dhimma, that they must be protective of minority religions and customs within their own land. They gave the Nestorians sanctuary and freedom. Didn’t help.

The Nestorians did what religionists absolutely love to do, and tore themselves apart over minutiae of doctrinal differences, but before imploding, decided that since the Annunciation was in spring, that meant the birth of Jesus was in early winter, and made Yaldā the regional word that equates to “Christmas.”

There is another word, “yelda” which, while spelled differently in English, is the same in Aramaic. Yelda means “dark night” or “long night.”

Yelda may have migrated from northern Europe, where it is pronounced “yule.”

Hmm. Start of winter, associated with birth and long dark nights, and yule. Oh, and the Christians swiped it. OK, it’s Solstice, all right.

A Viking probably would easily recognize the tone of Yaldā. People gather against the darkness and the forces of evil (“Ahriman”) and tell tales and jokes and recite poetry, and eat the best of the summer crop, mostly fruits. The foods eaten on that particular night have special properties; eating watermelon won’t do anything in particular on Yaldā night, but will protect you from heat exhaustion later on in the summer. Magic watermelons, at least on Solstice night. Some fruits and vegetables protect against insect bites, and garlic prevents rheumatism. In a lot of areas, contraband stashes of wine and beer are consumed, and lights are arrayed in the living areas.

It’s the evening of the 19th as I write this, and I’m in the southern part of California. It’s nearly full dark, but I can still see palms silhouetted against the sky. I was moping a bit, missing the snow and cold that to me is the hallmark of the winter Solstice. But this year, there is no snow where I live—the forth time in the past five years that’s happened—and while it’s cold up there, it’s satisfyingly nippy down here. So I’m not missing Solstice. Not really. It isn’t just winter, as the Iranians show.

I’ll have something nice for Solstice dinner and call family and friends.

And a rocket launch from nearby Vandenberg was scrubbed, and they have rescheduled for the night of…Solstice. Nothing like a bright light in the longest night to celebrate!

Reading that Solstice is celebrated, with its true meaning, in the dry and dusty lands of Persia, cheered me right up. How can you not like people who gather against the long darkness, and tell jokes and sing and enjoy food and drink and dream of a brighter future?

It’s what I hope we’re are all doing on Solstice night.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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Solstice 2012

Solstice 2012

A darkness from within

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December19th 2012

This is the Solstice piece, and it’s going out a few days early this year because, well, I want everyone to read it before the world ends on Friday.

I went to let the dog out last night near midnight, and there, near the horizon, was Nibiru, the rogue planet that’s going to destroy us all.

I tried warning people, but they just got out on their back porches and shouted that it’s just the damn MOON, and go to bed, you drunken fool, and other stuff that wasn’t so nice.

Well, let’s just see who’s laughing on Saturday, shall we?

Actually, we have a monster snowstorm due to start tomorrow night, and it has the makings of a Big Snow. That usually means the lights go out, and with them, the DSL. It’s not unusual here in the mountains, but I would be annoyed if I was sitting in the dark on Friday, knowing I could have gotten it out earlier but didn’t. We have heat, and the dog’s edible, so we’ll be fine.

Continue reading “Solstice 2012”

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Solstice 2011

Dies Natalis Invicti Solis

December 22nd 2011

Every December, I write a “Solstice piece”, and the theme is the same; this is the turnabout point, from now on, the days are getting longer, and eventually it will be spring.

Of course, there’s another element that I tend not to dwell upon. And that is that the Solstice is also the first day of Winter. And it’s just going to stay winter for another 90 days or so.

In fact, in eastern Canada, among other places, old man winter blows right through the Solstice and keeps right on intensifying. The snowiest and coldest month is often February, not December. For folks who depend on nice weather for their comfort and ease—and that’s most of us—the worst is yet to come. It will be a while for the days to be noticeably longer, and in the far north, it may be weeks or even a month or two before the first brief glimmer of blue sky to the south reminds people that there’s still a sun down there somewhere.

Continue reading “Solstice 2011”

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