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Solstice Diary 2023: For a Return of Sunlight, Rebirth and Hope [1]
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Date: 2023-12-21
At 10:27 pm today, we welcome the Winter Solstice.
Since 9/11, I’ve had my own private appreciation of the Solstice. That autumn, fear and uncertainty gripped us while temperatures fell. The light of hope was hard to sustain as each day’s sunlight decreased. As December slowly progressed, I yearned for the Solstice, hoping like the ancients for fear to subside as the days finally grew longer.
And it did.
Eventually.
Three years ago, Elizabeth Diaz wrote How We Survive Winter in the New York Times:
The great irony of winter is that the moment darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter.
In the twenty-two years since 2001 we have repeatedly been plunged into darkness, but also redeemed by light. It’s sometimes but not always sequential — redemption can be served cold or at any temperature.
In those years, darkness descended with the Iraq War, the Great Recession, Trump’s election, the Pandemic. But light emerged with election of our first African-American President, vaccines saving millions of lives, economic recovery and the miracle of ousting an authoritarian President through an election.
Yet darkness threatens again with the horrors of the Middle East and the persistence of authoritarianism here and throughout the world.
The Solstice is an annual reminder of one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s most famous quotes, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King was paraphrasing an 1853 sermon by abolitionist Theodore Parker.
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."
That famous quote can be misconstrued to foster complacency — that no matter what happens, in the long term justice will prevail. But history shows bending the arc requires continuing effort and struggle. It’s up to each generation to make it happen.
We can do it by devoting our time and money to whatever is necessary to prevail in the 2024 elections. We can do it on or own and allied with our children and grandchildren – Millennials and GenZ -- in a cross-generational alliance to make sure the liberation we have always sought does not slip away.
[Adapted in part from prior Solstice Diaries]
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