THE SOLSTICE AND THE CERTAINTY
Borland, Hal
The Solstice and the Certainty by HAL BORLAND \ s far back as the race memories run, the winter solstice has been a time of questioning and wonder that led to rediscovery of the basic certainties....
...By September we have wearied of summer...
...That is the gist of it, stated with the utmost economy...
...The ancient pagans measured shadows, built bonfires at the critical time, cut green boughs and begged the gods of What to keep their universe in order...
...Fundamentally, there are only two great dramas, the conflict of life and death, and that of light and darkness...
...It takes the shadow of imminent disaster to get most of us down on our knees...
...Albert went down the road, toward his house, his barns, and his cows...
...She laughed...
...We have no option, no choice except belief...
...We have had enough of sweat and muscle strain and want to sit and enjoy the fruits of our faith and leisure...
...Specifically, the shadow cast on the living room wall as the sun shines through the window facing east...
...That I know as surely as I know that the sun will rise...
...Summer is still upon us...
...Soon I shall come back inside, to the security of walls and roof and fire, fruit of my own providence...
...The snow had become so thick a curtain that I could scarcely see my house, only a quarter of a mile away...
...But it's theirs," and he nodded toward the vanished partridges...
...Rationalize it as we may, there is some force behind it...
...Rationality is not enough...
...And each year we pause at the edge of the woods and I examine a small clump of gray birches at the edge of the brook...
...We need acceptance of such a simple mystery as how a birch tree knows there will be another spring and prepares for it...
...The city, I said, must have been a rather frightening place that night...
...and all our intricate calculations can do is state the How and the Why in terms of elaborate equations...
...Despite the pious stories about its origins, I sometimes wonder if there weren't among those first celebrants of Thanksgiving at least a few who were secretly as grateful for an end to labor in the fields as for the harvest itself...
...I asked if the Big Blackout, the incredible power failure that paralyzed the Northeast early in November, had been responsible...
...I was about to go out for an afternoon breath of air, so I put on a heavy coat and cut across the pastures to join him...
...It wasn't by chance that it became the occasion for religious events that we now speak of, in our offhand way, as The Holidays...
...But, believing, he plants and watches the expected sprouting...
...The days and weeks of want and hunger may be somewhere in the back of our minds, but far back...
...The shift is only the breadth of my little finger, but it means that the sun has moved, as we say, back toward the north by one finger's breadth...
...Our faith is replenished...
...Now we can go on, facing this Wolf Moon, remembering that as the days lengthen the cold will strengthen, that February will be heaped with snow, that March will be both February and April, and that after the vernal equinox we will wait impatiently for spring on earth...
...Among his other books are "High, Wide and Lonesome," "When the Legends Die," and "This Hill, This Valley...
...Then we took stock...
...You have to believe in your own believing...
...I know that up here in the hills where memories are long and traditions treasured we tend to make short shrift of the thanks and congratulate ourselves on our own industry and foresight...
...Copyright © 1965 by Hal Borland) There is, of course, a fundamental faith rooted in the land...
...We stopped to watch a flock of juncos, like gray snowflakes caught in a gust, as they flew out of a weedy corner...
...A wise old countryman once said to me, "Every winter I have to renew my belief...
...Beyond the bud and the catkin, we had to express our own believing...
...We were lucky up here, being in a rare pocket with a local power source...
...for the rites are both an acknowledgment of the mysterious What, which the equations cannot reach, and the links with the long, long line of our own kind...
...So here we are, ready to face winter and welcome spring...
...But by mid-December we are aware of such a shadow...
...In fact, doubt is difficult in a green and hospitable world...
...I see a slight shift from the place that shadow touched that wall only a few days before...
...It doesn't really matter that we now explain it in terms of celestial order and rhythm, with their inevitable consequences...
...And when Christmas comes we observe the rites, doubly aware of the holiness...
...At first the snow came in huge clots, clumped flakes that splattered as they struck the window pane...
...The year approaches the climax of the eternal drama, the struggle between light and darkness...
...I never really saw a snowflake before...
...We welcome the autumn equinox and hard frost, an end to the HAL BORLAND, the distinguished nature writer, writes the editorials on nature for The New York Times...
...Night is at hand...
...She went on to talk about the magic of hoar frost and the beauty of snowflakes, about the color of the hills at dawn and dusk, the wonder of sunset and moonrise and stars...
...And I also observe the shadows...
...So it became a matter of intangibles, what we really wanted, and what the city offered—theatres, concerts, art exhibits...
...Albert watched them, a slight smile on his face, and said, "We ought to grub out that barberry," then added, still smiling, "if it was ours...
...Is our kind of knowledge the only kind we can accept, in the face of evidence all around us...
...I cannot understand the infinite variety of the snowflakes, but there they are crystalline perfection so fragile that my slightest breath reduces them to drops of moisture...
...In spring, -the farmer who plants a field partakes of that belief...
...But, being of ancient lineage ourselves and with the questioning and the wonder in our hearts, we went on and chose the tree and cut the boughs...
...The catkins are like miniature inchworms dangling here and there from twigs, male catkins tightly closed but with a store of pollen fine as motes...
...They can't get at the What, which lies beyond, the inevitability itself...
...And I knew it wasn't just the country, or sun, moon, stars, and glittering frost and snow—it was all of them, and more...
...Here is wholeness and holiness, and I partake, knowing that beyond the reasons lies belief...
...We talk of inevitability, at least for a few more million years...
...True, they hadn't yet faced the winter's test of faith, but they certainly had seen other winters come and go...
...We sacrifice the turkey, glorify the potato, the onion, and the turnip, outdo the forgotten inventors of pemmican with our mincemeat pies...
...It does not have all the answers...
...I return to the dooryard and stand there in the falling snow...
...And with the What itself...
...And when I asked, "Belief in what...
...He saw me coming and waited...
...You have to muster the deep-down belief that hope is not foolish and faith is not futile...
...The test comes in December, when you have to believe that onsetting winter will pass...
...In haying time we are thinking of the plenty, the faith and fecundity inherent in the seed...
...She and her husband came up here from the city last spring and bought a small house and a few rural acres for weekends and vacations...
...Albert is the kind who will stop his tractor and turn off the motor to listen to a bluebird in April...
...And if I am being anthropomorphic in saying that the tree knows, so be it...
...Knowing the Why and the How, even without the elaborate equations, he long ago reached for the What and sought to ally himself with it...
...Another week and the change will be two fingers' breadth...
...They returned to the city at the end of the summer, but they came back and settled in for good just before Thanksgiving...
...We really made up our minds last summer, though we didn't tell each other for several weeks...
...We were blacked out less than one minute...
...His latest book, "Countryman," is a summing up of his personal philosophy and includes some of his previous articles in The Progressive...
...There is another solstice in June, and perhaps if we had time in June we would take more note of it...
...He had given me his reason, and I came on home...
...I also knew he would come to the reason in his own time...
...We are ready for Thanksgiving...
...growing season...
...We almost stepped on a cottontail before it leaped from a grass clump and darted to safety in the brush...
...We made our decision a week before it happened...
...I once opened such a bud and found in it a furled leaf so small I needed a ten-power glass to trace its outlines, but unmistakably a leaf...
...It was, and still is, a holy time in the deepest sense...
...We do appreciate the plenty, but we also take credit for hard work well done...
...We have renewed our belief...
...As we walked along the fencerow he said, "I was wondering if we ought to plow this lot next spring and re-seed...
...Ever since he has been capable of wonder, man has been aware of them, and inevitably he has incorporated the parallels into his religious rites and beliefs...
...Winter has begun to pen us in, but eventually we will walk the pastures again, the quickening soil beneath our feet, root and seed alive and reaching for rain and sunlight...
...Like the old countryman, we believe in our own believing...
...he said, "My belief in believing...
...If he were given to doubt he would hoard the seed, breadstuff in itself, wondering whether it would sprout or rot in the ground...
...This may indicate a lack of proper piety, but it is not exactly an innovation...
...The dusk deepens...
...I knew that something in the living entity that is a tree had prepared for the going-on, for the time beyond the winter solstice...
...And as we approached a barberry tangle two ruffed grouse took off with a roar, startling us as always, and rocketed into the woods beyond...
...It was discovering the wonder and the mystery of life, taken directly, before someone else's interpretation penned them in beyond escape...
...And Things...
...But—and here is the core of meaning in the holidays we are observing—we can face even the Wolf Moon with confidence, knowing it, too, will pass...
...It has begun to snow...
...I don't mind winter, but I have to get out and feel the ground under my feet before it pens me in...
...Imagine...
...When we see the sun stand still, far off toward the south, and then swing north, lengthening the daylight after steady weeks of abbreviation, we are witness to a cosmic miracle...
...I return to the porch, and under the porch light I see the individual flakes on my coat sleeve...
...I put on a dark coat and go out to be a part of the evening, and when I look up I am in the midst of an incredible galaxy of snowflakes...
...I look for buds and catkins...
...I say "our" because our land adjoins and Albert leases my pastureland...
...Now they have begun to separate, falling like feathers...
...Last summer John was offered a part-time job in the village, and with that we could manage comfortably...
...We cut back toward the road, and Albert, who has lived on this land all his life, said, "The way this snow's coming, it'll stay on the ground for a while...
...The sky that darkened in early afternoon seemed to lighten a little while ago...
...He tills and tends, and when the time comes he takes his harvest...
...We brought them home, being racially committed to the green offering and the symbolic lights...
...but we take that inevitability on faith...
...But in June we are busy making hay, stowing the fragrant bales for the future...
...The buds are very small and they lie snug to the twigs...
...We need a few enduring mysteries, and no doubt we shall always have them...
...We weighed them all and decided we had to take life directly, not someone else's interpretation of it...
...This year I looked, as always, and those birches, though winter dormant, had leaf and blossom ready and waiting for April, made ready before first frost put an end to last summer...
...The solstice is safely passed, we observe symbolic Christmas with its life-and-death drama paralleling the drama of light-and-darkness...
...We walked about the pasture, making a show of examining the grass already grizzled with snow...
...the inevitability for which we are preparing is still remote...
...It is late afternoon and the bitter year-end wind is dying down...
...Man has always appreciated a good meal and a chance to rest, and his prayers have most often been for mercy rather than to offer thanks...
...But for a little while I am one with the dusk and the snow, and I am full of wonder...
...In a way, he was saying pretty much the same thing a woman said at a small gathering the other evening...
...I went out the day before Christmas to walk in the woods and I discovered snowflakes...
...We went on...
...The sky has disappeared...
...We talked all around the subject before we really faced it...
...So we observe the rites...
...We measure orbits and leave it to the astral physicists to keep things going properly...
...They planted it, and their crops are always full of the berries, this time of year...
...Each year, at the time of the solstice, we go up into the woods on our mountainside to choose a tree and gather greens for Christmas...
...We have dulled the fang of winter, even here in the country, but we still know the reasons for that naming...
...We have to take that on faith...
...This we know...
...We come now, of course, to what the Indians called the Wolf Moon...
...It is as simple as a seed, as inevitable as the seasons...
...Belief is easy in June, with summer all around you...
...There, beside the iced-in brook on the late December mountainside, was the promise that the winter solstice would pass and the sun would resume its certain course toward another vernal equinox...
...We came to the barway, went through and put the bars back up...
...I knew that was an excuse, not a reason...
...Our barns and silos are full, our pantries and our cellars are provisioned...
...Did they come back thinking our luck would hold in another emergency...
...A few weeks ago, in the first real snowstorm of the season, I saw Albert walking about our lower pasture...
...For all its teeming populations, this world is essentially a lonely place without those links...
Vol. 30 • January 1966 • No. 1
