IN TUNE WITH THIS WONDERFUL TIME OF YEAR

Winter Sunset, NC Beach

I am looking forward to the Winter Solstice, only about a month away, three nights before Christmas Eve.  As soon as the time changed, I began lighting candles against the darkness, eating supper earlier and enjoying an earlier bedtime.  As the days turn, I check Fairbanks, Alaska because we loved our time there.  Then it was the Summer Solstice with the dusk intermingling with the dawn.  No night at all.  This time of year, Fairbanks moves toward deep and long nights, ending with only 4 hours of daylight on the longest night of the year.  I would love to be there for the town fireworks and merriment. 

At the North Carolina Beach people are attuned to the waning day, on a clear winter afternoon heading over to the neighborhood sittum in hats and jackets to watch the sun drop behind the ocean. They stay for the show of colors across the horizon, leaving only when all is gray, the shore birds long gone.  If you live by the ocean, you share that pleasure, perhaps in a different season. 

Inland I am hardly aware of when the sun goes down.  Yesterday I noticed the pink beyond the trees while sweeping leaves from one place to another.  Our leaves aren't snow-covered like the Northeast and Midwest. Here, most afternoons the winter day is just all-of-a-sudden simply gone and the lights come on.  A good resolution for me is more mindfulness of the gifts of nature, more responsiveness to its rhythms.  

Saint Teresa of Calcutta says that God is the friend of silence.  "See how Nature--trees, flowers, grass--grows in silence," she says.  "The stars, the moon and the sun move in silence." That is what's so wonderful about being in our homes this time of year.  If we're lucky we can find a bit of silence.  Or at least only the sounds we want to hear. Right now, Mr. Wiggles is breathing softly and there is music in the background.  No one else is home.  The geese have not yet begun their ruckus as they decide where to roost.  The train won't pass for hours.  

No talk of busyness today.  I would like to stay in tune with what the world has to offer.  Perhaps we can all find some time for that.    

Happy Winter, Nina Naomi