Winter Solstice

Photo: Courtesy Office Public Works Ireland.


At this time of year, like many people, perhaps because of some evolutionary memory that we all have, I love to spend time cooking and baking and doing all the special things that people of all religions and none still partake in, at the darkest time of year---tending to home and hearth and, in the spirit of Hera, keeping the home fires burning. Feasting together, from pagan times onwards, has been how we humans have warded off cold, uncertainty, feelings of lack, and the precariousness of our existence in the great cosmos.

Yesterday was the Winter Solstice, the shortest day and the longest night, when our pagan ancestors celebrated the turning towards spring and lengthening of days that begins tomorrow. It is the day when our earth, hanging amidst the infinite lonely galaxies, swings upon its axis and turns towards light and hope, and our sun smiles back and graces us once more, for another cosmic cycle.

Five thousand years ago, the solstice sun's sacred climb to the sky was watched from Newgrange in Ireland (an ancient architectural wonder, which predates the pyramids and is still standing and functional) by humans who did not have our distractions and separations from the fundamentals of existence. On this day of days, deep in the inner chamber at Newgrange, golden dawnlight floods through the roofbox, built by our precision-astronomer ancestors for this very occasion when their window and the first rays of the rising sun are in perfect alignment---for one day every year, suddenly, all's aglow with golden sunshine, illuminating the megalithic iconography on the walls and enchanting the expectant faces of the 21st century pilgrims within....and all seems possible again.

If the builders of this mysterious place could speak to us through the millenia, they might quip, you cannot eat nintendo Wiis, or iPods! Don't forget, it is the sun that brings forth your food from the cold dark womb of winter and allows you look forward to another season of life!

Van Gogh's beautiful painting The Sower, captures the same pagan spirit that acknowledges the wonders of creation---a humbler humanity bowing to the divine order of things, which does not take creation for granted and recognises that constant miracle that is the food we eat. The painting, even its title, has an archetypal quality unusual in Van Gogh, evoking a similar affect in the viewer as the beautiful tarot paintings of Pamela Coleman Smyth. There seems to be something in it that we know to be true, that we have always known. Van Gogh gives the sun glorious centre-stage and the eponymous sower is depicted as a servant of the great forces of nature, deferential, almost marginal, not the anthrocentric 'man as master of creation'.


As the bleak winds of economic upheaval sweep the floor of presumption from beneath us and leave us fearful and disempowered, huddled in our uncertainty like our ancient ancestors, the solace of the table and of good company can give us comfort and solidity, just as it did them. The shiny sparkle has faded from our Big Bling era, now drawing to a close, leaving us slightly embarrassed that we were ever so foolish as to join in something so tawdry. And as always, we will return to the things that matter and the things that ground us and nourish us.

Now that the irrational exuberance of the last decade has fizzled out and exhausted us, forcing us all to slow down, we may have instead the gift of more time, to spend on what is truly worthwhile---perhaps the pleasures of home-cooking and days punctuated by the ceremonies of the table. They are still there for us, even though we abandoned them for a while.

Perhaps this is one of those times when a shift in human consciousness occurs----one of those amazing seismic shifts---in which we will reconnect with our earth which provides our food, and stop allowing the exploitative greed of some people to destroy it. Could it be, that on this Solstice, a new era is dawning, in which humanity will again reclaim the wonder and love of creation that our ancestors felt when they rejoiced in the icy, clear, dawn skies of the solstice, and watched the sun regain its strength and felt gratitude to the earth which would give us food again next year?

You can see the sun light up the Newgrange chamber at this page on the Heritage Ireland website(naturally, it doesn't do justice to the real experience.)

Blessings on your table this Solstice!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

The disgraced ideology of the food industry

We have seen recently the collapse of the financial world, due to lack of regulation and the unfettered pursuit of profit at all costs by sectional interests. Our food is also suffering under this same ideology. The further the consumer becomes separated from the primary producer (the farmer) the more we need strong state regulation, in the interests of the common good. But in the area of food, as much as high finance, there is the problem that our weakened, corrupted democracies, are 'sold' off to the highest bidders, the political donors and lobbyists. A fetishistic adulation of 'the free market' has been cleverly cultivated by those who will benefit from it, and those who should oppose it, seem to have been emasculated by the bright, slick, shiny glare of neo-con buccaneers, and watched from the sidelines as though unable to oppose this sexy, brash ideology, which seemed to slay criticism with a mere sneer or a bit of name-calling---the same techniques the Far Right used so successfully in the McCarthy era, and which were so eloquently deciphered by Arthur Miller in his Harvard lecture The Crucible in History. And again, in our times as before, as Yeats once decried, The best lack all conviction/And the worst are full of passionate intensity. In the area of food this ideology manifests as BSE, dioxins and hormones in meat and dairy, polluted water tables, chemical saturated fruit and vegetables and food that is causing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes which will hit us like a time bomb in the coming decades.




Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com