Journal of a Sabbatical

December 21, 2000

yang line

Quote of the day:

"A yang line appeared last night on the solstice

Everything turns with joy toward the light" -- Stonehouse translated by Red Pine in The Zen Works of Stonehouse

Some winter solstice links:

Winter Solstice - Astronomy - let's start with the science.

Sacred Plants of the Winter Solstice - hey, any holiday that worships conifers, I'm there.

Candlegrove - ancient origins and history of winter solstice celebrations. Well worth a visit. Lots of cool stuff.

About the Winter Solstice - more science, including a very cool tool to calculate the number of daylight hours at any latitude, at any time of the year. If you don't know your latitude, they have a link to help you find it.

Today's Reading:

Tall Trees and Far Horizons by Virginia Eifert

Winter from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake

The Zen Works of Stonehouse translated by Red Pine

Ned woke me up this morning then kept apologizing for it all day. I told him it's OK 'cause the last time somebody woke me with a phone call I ended up in China taking pictures of conifer specimens. I tell people they can call me after 8:30, but lately the real wake-up time has been 9:30. Shame on me for wasting the few hours of daylight in the dark time of the year.

So, speaking of dark, I spent a couple of hours in Ned's basement sitting by the fire talking about writing. When he suggested I come over and hang out in the basement, he mentioned it'd be dark. He knows I have a thing about dark, especially in the winter. For some reason, it was OK with me today though. We had our coffee in the sunny kitchen and then retired to the basement.

We talked for hours about the projects I'm procrastinating on, the problem I have with my novel ... I have lost access to my characters, which is only comprehensible to people whose writing process is somewhat similar - i.e. not to my therapist who is completely baffled by my description of what used to go on and now doesn't. Ned immediately grokked what I meant, which was a relief. ... and some stuff I could do on his novel. Evidently my research on the giant beavers was so helpful I'm now some sort of unofficial editor as well as research assistant. When this novel comes out, remember the giant beavers were my idea and I did all the research on what they looked like, when the lived, when they died out, what they ate...

When I left Ned's basement, I grabbed a vegetarian combo plate at the Earth Food Store and carried it to Starbucks to eat over some more coffee. I figured all my friends would have been and gone because it was so late but moments after I sat down at the counter, Dan appeared sans Geri. We talked of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, of word origins, place names, and academic politics... Then who to my wondering eyes should appear but Tom who had just handed in his grades for the semester and is now eligible to be paid. Why they withhold the professors' salaries until hey hand in the grades is beyond me. It sounds so juvenile. Anyway, I felt like I had a real warm connection with both Dan and Tom -- really a rich afternoon of relating, especially after my intense conversation with Ned. For once I felt like I'd made human contact all day.

Ned is definitely a yang energy. Dan is quite yang too.   Tom is fairly yin in a lot of ways, although I think the Tao te ching specifies that all men are mainly yang. I was thinking about this after I read Stonehouse's poem about the winter solstice. According to Chinese tradition yin energy is at its most potent during the time leading up to the winter solstice. This roughly two week period is represented in the Chinese calendar by a hexagram with six broken (yin) lines (K'un). On the night of the solstice, the calendar switches to a different hexagram with one solid (yang) line at the bottom (Fu). So the yang line appears tonight. Just in the nick of time...