The Winter Solstice

The sun rose today at 7:29 AM in Iowa City, and will set at 4:38 PM, leaving us with 9 hours and 9 minutes of daylight, the shortest day of the year, the Solstice.

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In my house we still have no Christmas tree up, although Augusto did hang the lights outside and they look nice.

Outside the ground is an ugly brown, the one snowfall we've had this year having melted some time ago.

And yet, I feel at peace. More peaceful than I have felt in a long time. I am enjoying life, those who it presents to me, the activities that this busy mind searches out, all the wonderful literature in Spanish and English available to absorb.

In two days I will again be in the presence of my family. It has been over a year since we were all together in the same place at the same time, and I am very thankful for the time and financial abilities we have to be able to celebrate together.

I heard via telephone yesterday from my Venezuelan family; they are also peacefully busy with holiday preparations, the recent political happenings notwithstanding. I have been blessed with so many families: my wife and kids, my dad, brothers and sisters, my loved ones in Venezuela still in my life 15 years after leaving, the Peruvians that are our newest family after a two month adventure last summer. I hope to create much more family as the sun ebbs and flows.

Peru beckons and will continue to do so; I am hoping that one summer soon we can live in Cusco, the ancient Inca capital, alive with millenia of indigenous history, a tremendous local pride, salt of the earth people with rosy cheeks. But not this year.

For the year, in many ways, is beginning anew. Tomorrow we'll have more sun than today, and more the next day, and the day after that, for six months, when another solstice awaits us, almost 15 hours of daylight, Iowa green, corn and soybeans surging upward, baseball game after baseball game after baseball game.

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It all seems so far away, in the dark and cold of December.  And in some ways it is.  But when we're not paying attention, the days have this way of melting into one another, and winter slips into spring, the days clicking one after the other, disappearing before our very eyes, just like the sunlight does on this shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice.



May peace be with you and yours in the year to come.   Mark