Merry Christmas

from all of us to all of you

Another Solstice Rears Its Ugly Head (6WS)

(so I'm a little late)

WINTERSONG--

     HARVESTING THE LIGHT

In winter we carry mirrors

to dark rooms,

harvesting the light;

December’s pale sun thus becomes

a multitude of suns.

We send candles into the darkness.

Nothing is wasted.

Seen from the proper angle

morning sun becomes an infinity of light

reaching back to the first sunrise

on the first day,

reaching ahead to the last.

Dark rooms are transformed

by prisms of clear light.

As winter moves into spring

we adjust the mirrors

in rhythm with the lengthened days,

tinkering with the available light;

harvesting, harvesting.

By March we nearly have it right.

Snow, Rain, Sleet, Snow, Snow, Cold (6WS)

What, no thunderstorms?  No hail?  No gale force winds?   Only one blizzard this month and that was two weeks ago...

Something is terribly wrong, the temps are actually above 0 F. (thats -17C, folks) and I may be able to go outside without fearing for my life, my bone structure, and my dignity.






Maybe tomorrow.  When I can no longer see my reflection in the surface of the driveway

Suspended Animation

Over the past few weeks I've been reading into the "Next Blog" place;  its amazing the number of people who have just stopped posting,  usually just before a cliffhanger, like the birth of a child, or a trip, or a wedding.  Maybe they started up another, elsewhere, a year or two later, or just  never went back to take the old one down.

In a way its like finding an unfinished undated letter that begins,
"Dear Mom and Dad, 
things have been a bit rough here but  we seem to have gotten things back on track, 
now that both kids are home and safe now,  I promise to keep"

--and there's a photo of two cute kids,  boy and a girl, he has a leg cast and she has  a huge plaster across one side of the head.  you'll always wonder who these people were, what happened to the kids, and what happened to let that letter be abandoned.

Unfinished blogs are like that, too. They just hang in the air, some of them started years before, hundreds and hundreds of photos (and oh I do wish they had taken down the kids pictures first) and hundreds of posts. And for five years or longer those blogs have sat there while the parents aged,  the kids grew up, the dog died, and their  life moved away and down a different street;

The kind that started mostly as a kind of textual howl of rage or annoyance, page after page filled with self pity and really REALLY strange pictures, and then disappeared;

Bad poetry, mostly written by girls with too much green hair, fake tattoos and ugly glittery shoes. Or fan sites in another language which are little more than paeans to young rock stars or anime characters;

Now and then a serious connect with someone , in that way that happens when you least expect it,  you somehow collide in mid-blog with someone and keep going back.  You lurk. They lurk back. Its like a dance with one person and yet you're watching that other neat person across the dance floor, who is also looking back...

You wonder if anyone in those abandoned blogs even realizes--or cares--that they're here apparently forever, in suspended animation, part of a life preserved under glass.