solstice
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

20::December::2008 14:54 → permalink

Transmediale09 tasks start to form up. Though the decision to go to Berlin is not made quite yet. I can participate to a degree without going, working as a remote online moderator for the conference.

Winter Solstice about over and gone. To stretch days to June 21. No problem with that. Here sunrise was at 07:33 and sunset at 17:23. Not bad, day hardly shrinks from summer when the nights are still long and dark.

As the basement chill grows. It’ll be long underwear here. With no sunshine. Star shine tonight, perhaps sun tomorrow. I’ll watch the sun come up. The windows are warped in most the house. One way or the other. Gap at the bottom of the big one facing south. When the Pacific storms come ripping through both that window and the western one over the guest bed leaks a bit. Will have to see if I can effect a fix. Reading Thoreau. And others.

I do not regret my not having seen this before, since I now saw it under circumstances so favorable. I was in just the frame of mind to see something wonderful, and this was a phenomenon adequate to my circumstances and expectation and it put me on the alert to see more like it. I exulted like “a pagan suckled in a creed” that had never been worn at all, but was bran new, and adequate to the occasion. I let science slide, and rejoiced in that Light as if it had been a fellow creature. I saw that it was excellent, and was very glad to know that it was so cheap. A scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. That is for pale daylight. Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes.

It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day — not an empty chamber, but an inhabited house — and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them. Your so-called wise man goes trying to persuade himself that there is no entity there but himself and his traps, but it is a great deal easier to believe the truth. It suggested, too, that the same experience always gives birth to the same sort of belief or religion. One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man. I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing from the missionary. I am not sure but all that would tempt me to teach the Indian my religion would be his promise to teach me his. Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the Light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth. — Hank Thoreau

 → comment
→ cats:: travelog
→ tags:: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
no comments yet...

comments closed