It's so easy in the cold to feel the darkness of the year

[sovay]

This longest night feels especially long. I found myself wondering whether, when she set the strange and ice-glittering Capricorn as guardian of the stair to the great waters that lie at the very depth of the sea in The Valley of Song (1951), Elizabeth Goudge had remembered that the sign of the goat-fish was once the symbol of Enki, the lord of the deep waters of life, or if she merely arrived at the likeness by way of solstice and water and the iconography of descent and return. I can imagine a drowned sun this year, roped down under the rush of the sea: salt-burst, strangling. Let it rise and leave its fetters to turn to seafoam, plaits of kelp tangled ashore in the dawn. It will not need a dark ship to return from Hades. Let it come in with the tide.

Comments

[asakiyume]

My sister posted a great photo combination just shy of the solstice: the moon high in the sky and the sun walking the Earth like a mortal. Your meditation makes me see it with solstice eyes.

[sovay]

the moon high in the sky and the sun walking the Earth like a mortal. Your meditation makes me see it with solstice eyes.

Thank you for sharing it with me! nineweaving would like it, too.

[nineweaving]

nineweaving would like it, too.

So I do! I love this figure in the dance, when the partners wheel about, and the music slows to its almost standstill.

Nine

[selkie]

The last four sentences are totally a poem.

All that falls will rise again. Except case counts, please, fuck.

[sovay]

The last four sentences are totally a poem.

Thank you.

All that falls will rise again. Except case counts, please, fuck.

*hugs*

[nineweaving]

O my! How beautiful!

I can see those last sentences as a rite.

Nine

[sovay]

I can see those last sentences as a rite.

Thank you. Happy solstice!

[ethelmay]

My husband just bought this Peter Boome print, which seems somewhat appropriate (a sun, though not necessarily drowned): https://stoningtongallery.com/artwork/morning-sun/ (other work: https://araquin-designs.square.site/).

[sovay]

My husband just bought this Peter Boome print, which seems somewhat appropriate (a sun, though not necessarily drowned)

That is excellently solstitial!

[gwynnega]

This is beautiful.

[sovay]

This is beautiful.

Thank you.

[radiantfracture]

That's incredible.

And I did not know that, about Capricorn and Enki.

I can imagine a drowned sun this year, roped down under the rush of the sea: salt-burst, strangling. Let it rise and leave its fetters to turn to seafoam, plaits of kelp tangled ashore in the dawn. It will not need a dark ship to return from Hades. Let it come in with the tide.

May it be so.

[sovay]

That's incredible.

Thank you.

And I did not know that, about Capricorn and Enki.

One of the items I used to visit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is a Babylonian stamp seal from the seventh or sixth century BCE. It is made of a translucently bluish, almost moonstone-like agate, in the shape of a duck with its head turned back against its wing; it leaves the stamp of a goat-fish—suḫurmāšu—with a crescent moon and the asterisk of a star. I have loved it since before I could read cuneiform. I haven't seen it in two years and I miss it.