It’s here. Today there was more daylight than there was yesterday. I do not care if it was 2, 4, 6, or eight seconds. Time is not of the essence. What’s of the essence is the fact that tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, there will be more light.

Pete’s teaching schedule is going to be bottom instead of top heavy, so I won’t be spending hours on end, in the evenings, in the darkness.

Bill Fuller getting a load of wood

I wonder what it would be like to have no light at night. Lamps and candles would have to suffice, but what about before then? People lived outside, and they lit fires. It would be cool to watch a video in which time goes in reverse. The focus of this video would be on how humans dealt with the lack of light.

I remember that a friend, Bill Fuller, used to deal with seasonal affective disorder by going to a large grocery store and walking around under their lights. He said this worked. I was dubious. I still am dubious. Artificial light is of course not real light.

People put lights on their houses and on their trees. There are two reasons for this. One is that they are afraid of the dark. The other reason is that the absence of light depresses them. We do not do any decorating of this kind. We do have a string of LED lights above the kitchen window. This makes going up and down the stairs at night safer.

We also have some hanging decorations above the kitchen window. They are there all year because I am not sure where I’d store them if we took them down. Most likely, I’d forget where they are. And then we’d have to put them back up the following year.

Moths are attracted to light. And fireflies are a source of light. I wonder if people ever brought a jar of fireflies in their house and attempted to read by what was in the jar.

Supposedly, right now the sun is sending out solar flares. This isn’t anything we can imagine. I wonder how close to the sun a person could get before they burned up. I’ll bet you this has already been figured out.

There are many, many suns. They are stars. I wonder what other life forms are out there. I wonder if any of these life forms are now celebrating the solstice.

Humans are aware of the concepts of life and death. You come into this world and learn that you are someday going to die. I think that I realized this when I was five years old. I then became afraid of the dark and had to have the hall light on. This was when we lived on the shores of Lake Ontario. This was about the time I was acquainted with the poem, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take.”

Shit. No wonder I didn’t and still don’t embrace death, which to me is a very dark place.

Next: 348. 12/22/24 Staring Out into Space