Circling the woods in vain . . .

It's the Satyr's day … and the Winter Solstice is settling over Okieland. Today will be a full one second longer than yesterday.

Winter Solstice

The longest night.

The shortest day.

Giving birth

to the light of the world.

– jab

In the Northern Hemisphere, today is officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest-known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale.

On this day in 1620, the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock on the shores of Massachusetts.

It is not happiness that makes us grateful. It’s gratefulness that makes us happy. – Br. David Stendl-Rast

Navigating the disruptions in the flow as threatened by Der Trumpenfurher.

It can get really cold in Minnesota this time of year. – Garrison Keillor

To Wen Tingyun On a Winter's Night

How unbearable, rummaging for poems

to read aloud beneath my lamp

on this long sleepless night

with my bedding so frighfully cold.

A bitter wind rises in my courtyard

filled with twigs and leaves.

I peek through the curtains

and pity the sinking moon.

Relaxed now,without retraint

my hopes finally fufilled –

in the emptiness I see original mind.

Living in seclusion, I dont just

nest in the phoenix's tree –

as the sun goes down,

chirping sparrows

circle the woods in vain

– Yu Xuanji (843 C.E. - 868 C.E.), “To Wen Tingyun On a Winter's Night,” in Yin Montain, Poems in Correspondence, Translated by Peter Levitt and Rebecca Nie, Shambhala, 2022, ppg 140.