{"id":675,"date":"2010-12-21T08:23:37","date_gmt":"2010-12-21T13:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=675"},"modified":"2010-12-21T08:23:37","modified_gmt":"2010-12-21T13:23:37","slug":"solstice-solace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/miscellaneous\/solstice-solace\/","title":{"rendered":"Solstice Solace"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

You Are Here<\/p><\/div>\n

Some days, when the sun hovers over the horizon for barely nine hours, I can feel our planet swinging through its black orbit. The sunlight is a sparse, white, cloudy force coming from the south, replacing all that was once green with motionless gray and white, and I can feel the slow, huge, roll of the Earth.<\/p>\n

I love the solstice. It\u2019s one of the things I\u2019ve been sure of since fourth grade, when I first learned the importance of December 21st<\/sup>, March 21st<\/sup>, June 21st<\/sup>, and September 21st<\/sup>, leaving out leap years.\u00a0 I like the extreme night in the Earth\u2019s shadow. I think about the north pole, where the sun goes down for months, and then reappears to hug the horizon all 360\u00b0, and then gradually spirals upward overhead to circle around and around for six months before setting again.\u00a0 Do you call it a day when sunlight lasts for months, when you only have one day and one night a year?\u00a0 Can it even feel like Earth?<\/p>\n

Sometimes, this time of year, you don\u2019t have to go far to feel like you\u2019re on an alien planet.\u00a0 Colored lights and bells appear in strange places.\u00a0 It\u2019s equally possible to discover that the world has remained the same and you\u2019ve become the alien.\u00a0 It happens to me.\u00a0 I look up, lost at a party of strangers, to discover we can spot each other, we fellow aliens.\u00a0 There are more of us than I ever knew.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Earth in 4 Key Places. Note the Light for the Solstice. Not to scale.<\/p><\/div>\n

Tonight at 11:38 (Universal Time (we have Universal Time?)) the earth will reach the solstice and we in the northern hemisphere will start back towards the light.\u00a0 The tilt of the Earth remains the same, of course, steadily pointing toward the North Star.\u00a0 It\u2019s just the angle of the tilt compared to the sun that will change as the earth revolves.\u00a0 Add in the fact that the Earth bulges and wobbles, so that the sunrise will come later some mornings even as the days begin to lengthen, and you\u2019ll find it\u2019s an imperfect, quirky process, really.\u00a0 There are subtleties that only matter if you trust the clock.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help wondering what would happen if the days just kept getting shorter.\u00a0 How soon would we notice if the solstice didn\u2019t turn us back?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some days, when the sun hovers over the horizon for barely nine hours, I can feel our planet swinging through its black orbit. The sunlight is a sparse, white, cloudy force coming from the south, replacing all that was once green with motionless gray and white, and I can feel the slow, huge, roll of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":679,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}