I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will.
black and gray drowns out the blue oceans full of plastic poison in our water virus in the air deserts are dryer water in the streets glasers are melting forests are burning times are changing
I bring them from the mountains, from the sea, from the edge of streams and look at them, heft them, hold them hard while they keep holding themselves harder. Is it because they haven’t had to change their surfaces in our time though, in theirs, they’ve suffered the blunt demands of ice and water and wind and god knows fire, been cracked and frozen, thawed, made molten again and again have started over grinding and being ground from monument to boulder, to rock, to river stone, to gravel, to pebbles, to sand, to slurries of grit, to dust?
The beggar man and the mighty king are only diff’rent in name, For they are treated just the same by fate. Today a smile and tomorrow a tear, We’re never sure what’s in store, So learn your lesson before it is too late, so
Be like I, hold your head up high, Till you find a bluebird of happiness. You will find greater peace of mind Knowing there’s a bluebird of happiness. And when he sings to you, Though you’re deep in blue, You will see a ray of light creep through, And so remember this, life is no abyss, Somewhere there’s a bluebird of happiness.
So the shortest day came, and the year died, And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world Came people singing, dancing, To drive the dark away. They lighted candles in the winter trees; They hung their homes with evergreen; They burned beseeching fires all night long To keep the year alive, And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake They shouted, reveling. Through all the frosty ages you can hear them Echoing behind us—Listen!! All the long echoes sing the same delight, This shortest day, As promise wakens in the sleeping land: They carol, feast, give thanks, And dearly love their friends, And hope for peace. And so do we, here, now, This year and every year. Welcome Yule!
Hunters in the Snow– painting by Pieter Bruegel the Eider
As we experience the shortest day of the year, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting, “Hunters in the Snow,” is an almost perfect picture of the contrasting scenes we experience this time of year, depicting isolation and melancholy producing a sense that we are being pulled into a silent landscape where the deep drifts of snow where you can “feel the cold and sense the audible dullness as the landscape sucks the sound from every little human vignette.”
His paintings are beautiful because his compositions make one of the opposites, based on Eli Siegel’s principle of aesthetic realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making of one of the opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
What marks upon the yielding clay? Two marks Made by my feet, two by my daimon’s feet But all confused because my marks and his Are on the selfsame spot, his toes Where my heels fell, for he and I Pausing a moment in our headlong flight Face opposite ways, my future being his past.
winter’s sun casts long shadows on the shortest day creating contrasting values of shape between objects and the wall in turn capturing my eye as darkness wins
— kenne
(Nōtan (濃淡) is a Japanese word, meaning dark-light, there is no English language equivalent. It embodies an ancient Eastern concept, in which all things exist as inseparable and in perfect harmony.)