Comin' around

Last night was the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year. Starting today, the days will get a little bit longer with each one that passes; first by just a few seconds and then as we head towards summer, by a minute or two each day.  This happens because the earth comes to a point where it hits a far spot in its elliptical path around the sun, and then begins coming back around again.  Kind of like a race car which reaches the far end of the track, then whips around the curve and begins circling back to the place it started.


I'm conscious that this particular "trip around the track" will see us leaving this area.  I think about moving every day.  When I did my ancestral family tree last year, I discovered my family has been in this country since 1635, when they left England to join the Massachusetts colony.  Soon after they left there to found a settlement in Long Island, New York.  And sometime after that, they left again and headed out to West Virginia, where they stayed put for about 200 years. But after 200 years, something made my grandfather leave West Virginia to come west to California, back in the 1940's. Maybe it was the promise of better weather.  Or plentiful jobs.  Or just the chance to reinvent himself in a new form, a new lifestyle, which would include trips to the beach instead of outside to shovel snow off the driveway.  


I come from a family of folks who have always been willing to head west and establish a beachhead in undiscovered country.  I'm no different.  I will take all that I've learned up to this point to The New Place, just as my ancestors did.  And I will start again, discovering in the process exactly where I fit in and what I'm supposed to be doing there.  


I will visit the beach, often, and I will find a good patch of land on which to keep some animals and grow some vegetables.  And by doing all these things, I will hopefully honor those who came before me, the ones who were not afraid to leave and begin afresh elsewhere, who loved rather than feared the thought of the sun setting over an unfamiliar horizon each night, until it was no longer unfamiliar to them.  


But for now, from my perspective on this far side of the sun, I will sit and I will dream about what's to come, while the nights are still long and while we bide our time through winter.  After all, what are the long nights for if not to dream?