Merry Saturnalia!

Dies Natalis Solis Invicti

Astronomically speaking, I'm a few days late on the Sol Invictus front; but we've had a stretch of typically grey mid-western mid-winter of late, and the sun has not been particularly generous with its presence. And, now that Christmas is behind me I can focus on the thing that really matters: the days WILL be getting longer now, even if the worst of winter is still ahead of us.

As this page points out, many cultures have noted or celebrated the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Of course it is not the brevity of that day that is celebrated; it is the fact that the solstice is followed by steadily lengthening days and, eventually by warmer weather. In our agricultural past this was a matter, quite literally, of life and death. The months of autumn bring with them the certain, though often lovely, death of plant life across the land. But after the leaves have fallen and the stark skeletons of trees cast long shadows across the cold, lifeless soil, it can seem that death's victory is complete and final. To our ancestors, who were much more aware than we are that our lives depend on the productivity of the soils, this long season of death often brought an existential crisis, defined by the simplest of questions: have we stored enough food to last until summer? But it takes no great imagination to see how the literal existential crisis of the food supply could be mirrored by a philosophical/spiritual crisis; the fact that this spiritual counterpart is the product of what we today call an affective condition, one sparked perhaps by something as mundane as insufficient sunlight, does little to diminish the profundity of the spiritual condition. Whether it be the poets who may (or may not!) have turned ancient pagan vegetation rituals into Grail legends (think of the Arthurian Wasteland, a kingdom lying barren in the clutches of death, awaiting the hero who will bring renewal) or the monks fighting off  mid-winter acedia, the stark landscape of winter's death has probably been seen as a metaphor ever since humans first wandered into temperate zones and, rather stupidly, failed to turn back southward!

So much for the scientific method

Due to a general state of inertia I have gone about a week now without the fish oil that has been part of my anti-suicide kit for the past year and a half. (About that inertia: it does not feel like depression; it is more a sense of paralyzing hopelessness, which seems to exist independent of the usual affective downsides to such thinking.  Which is to say: it IS difficult to get motivated to do things, but my mood is generally OK, considering everything. By everything I mean: winter coming on; no $$ to speak of, still no real prospects that I'll be able to put my training to work in a real job. The usual stuff! But due, perhaps, to the sunny days and warm weather, which have allowed me to get out and exercise in the sun the past few days, even to do so barefoot, my mood is hanging in there....)

But, about that fish oil.