Comments | azalaisdep: Winter Solstice

azalaisdep

Winter Solstice

Dec 21, 2011 23:24

If it's Second Small Person's birthday, then it must also be the winter solstice, that time when at the darkest moment of the year we need thoughts of warmth and celebration and light. Two things I thought I would share, this year:

( T. S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi )

solstice, poetry, books

Comments 15

engarian December 21 2011, 23:37:32 UTC

On this longest night, I send you White Light and the Blessings of the Path. I send you friendships and flowers and soft summer breezes to come. I send you music and the song of birds and the laughter of the sunlight on the rushing creek waters. I send you love, I send you life, I send you light.

Goddess Bless -

- Erulisse (one L)

azalaisdep December 21 2011, 23:41:30 UTC

Thank you, indeed. Blessed be :-)

espresso_addict December 22 2011, 00:49:16 UTC

Thank you! I adore both 'Journey of the Magi', my second TS Eliot, and The Grey King, one of the very best children's novels.

azalaisdep December 22 2011, 13:16:21 UTC

You're welcome - I enjoyed mulling over what to post last night with a glass of wine and a pile of books!

kortirion December 22 2011, 01:06:33 UTC

Good wishes! Warmth and light, may you never lack either.

Thanks for the winter readings, I enjoyed the moments of contemplation, and ditto, both poem and books are favourites of mine as well. :)

azalaisdep December 22 2011, 13:17:07 UTC

My flist seems to have remarkably homogenous tastes in this regard - I'm glad you enjoyed them!

jay_of_lasgalen December 22 2011, 01:15:19 UTC

I love Eliot's poem, and just finished my annual re-read of The Dark is Rising today! I love that series.

Another traditional favourite is the Box of Delights by John Masefield (Sea Fever). It was dramatised on Radio 4 several years ago, and I listen to the CD every Christmas.

azalaisdep December 22 2011, 13:20:47 UTC

Ah, but do you remember the wonderful BBC TV adaptation from the Eighties? With Patrick Troughton and Robert Stephens! That was so much a part of my childhood - complete with the fantastic theme music, the "First Nowell" section of Hely-Hutchinson's Carol Symphony. The music used to make me want to cry and still does - the first time I heard the whole of the Carol Symphony on the radio I thought "But - that's the Box of Delights theme tune!"

I think we have the book here at work; I should get it out and see what First would make of it...

jay_of_lasgalen December 22 2011, 14:45:24 UTC

The TV series was wonderful! My son was about five months old then, and we sat by the fire and watched it together every week. I've never read the book, though - I must try to find it.

( The series was part of your childhood? Oh, dear ... I'm showing my age!)

azalaisdep December 22 2011, 14:51:53 UTC

Well, my teenageness, just about - I was twelve-turning-thirteen when it was first broadcast ;-)

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azalaisdep December 22 2011, 13:27:46 UTC

The older I get, the more it seems to me that capital-D metaphysical Dark and capital-L metaphysical Light are human inventions, and that those human inventions are the source of a lot of suffering in the world.

Yes, I agree with you; which is why I found that piece so thought-provoking last night, I think. I'm not sure whether Susan Cooper really believes, or wants her readers to believe, that Good and Evil exist as abstract metaphysical forces; clearly within the world of TDIR they do, but that's manifestly a fantasy world, albeit a fantasy version of our world.

I'm very struck by what she has Will say about "The charity and the mercy and the humanitarianism are for you, they are the only things by which men are able to exist together in peace" - because of course if Good and Evil do not exist cosmically/transcendently (or if humankind could know nothing of them if they did, which might come to the same thing in terms of how we live our lives), then 'the charity and the mercy and the humanitarianism' are, as she says, all that ( ... )

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azalaisdep December 23 2011, 11:26:55 UTC

What about "The Waters of Mars"?

Oh, WoM. So utterly brilliant because, as you say, it's all so complicated. I watch it knowing that (as you've pointed out elsewhere) the Doctor ought to have turned his helmet speakers off, that he ought to have walked away, and I remember the first time I watched it thinking "OMG!!! Is RTD actually going to make him do that? Not go back? Wow, that's dark, and brilliant, and different, and..." - but then at the same time being profoundly relieved when he did go back, because if he hadn't, I'm not sure he would have been the Doctor any more ( ... )