VIRGINS IN PICKUP TRUCKS, ROCKETS & THE SOLSTICE

Today, December 21, is the Winter Solstice, when days in the Earth's Northern Hemisphere stop shortening, and start growing longer.

Up north, few people pay attention to the Solstice, and down here it's even less recognized. One reason is that nowadays holidays overlap, especially here in Mexico. For example, last week, all through two nights, rockets exploded over neighboring Ek Balam and Santa Rita, as they celebrated the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Oswaldo, one of the rancho's workers, tells me that the rockets express one's faith. During the Virgin of Guadalupe days, Oswaldo took off from work to join a group of young people who'd promised the Virgin they'd run a long distance carrying a torch in her honor, if she'd grant them a wish. Oswaldo's group, alternating runners, started in Progreso on the coast, went around Mérida and ended in Ek Balam, a trip taking maybe three hours in a car.

On highways during those days it was hard to go far without having to slow for such clusters of runners at the road's edge. Normally the runners were attended by a pickup truck carrying in the back a garlanded statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and followed by a motorcycle equipped with a loud siren changing its bleating style every few seconds. In towns there was lots of drinking, celebratory eating and shooting off of exploding rockets. Now things are gearing up for the gringo Christmas on the 24th and 25th, the Christian New Year, and the traditional Christmas on January 6th. No one has time to think of the Solstice.

Both Oswaldo's ancient Maya ancestors and my own European ones regarded the Solstice as very important, as the alignment of certain Maya pyramids and Stonehenge attest. The ancients saw with their own eyes and understood with their own minds that the Solstice was the most profound physically expressed promise of rebirth and hope to be witnessed during the whole year here on Earth.

Yet, modern human society has abandoned that insight and sense of awe, and has chosen instead to make a fuss about human-designated events clustering around the Solstice.

The reasons why Christmas and January 1st occur when they do are varied, but one reason they cluster around the Solstice is because powerful people set them there, with their own interests in mind. They took advantage of the fact that people already celebrated the Solstice, by assigning dates for Christmas and January 1st near it. Then they preached against pagan Solstice celebrations. It was the old story of powerful people telling us to ignore what our own minds tell us and our hearts feel, and believe instead what they tell us to believe.

You might be interested in the web pages entitled Why is Christmas Day on the 25th December?" and "Why Does the New Year Start on January 1?".

Whatever accounts for the vast majority of people at this season celebrating everything except the Solstice, I'll have no part of it.

I say that today is the New Year, that today more than any other day of the year is when I should reflect on who I am, where, and why, and on the possibility of new personal beginnings, and of doing things better this next time around. And on the matter of Christmas, I feel that by ignoring the whole thing as it's celebrated now, I'm honoring Jesus's principle admonition, which was that we should live simple and humble lives focused on our spiritual natures.

And today is the day I'm doing this, not at Christmas, and not on the day the calendar declares as the New Year, on January 1st.

Today.