Personal Journal

High Holy Day

I want to have a home in South America, equivalent lattitude to Colorado, so Chile or Argentina, maybe Peru. Because I want to be where summer is starting on each solstice.

The solstice is important to me. I don't know why. It may have started as some pagan thing I brought from my fascination with Aztec/Inca culture. It may have simply been that summers were always my favorite time of year. The absence of school (most years) lead to an absence of bullies. The trips to Ohio to the farm were the highlight of my youth, as there was often no mother, and no brother, and I was alone.

Somewhere during college, in my questioning (actually better stated as persecution back then) of religious authority and bureaucracy, I thought that the worship of a sun god actually made a lot of logical sense, in that the absence of the sun would destroy all live in the universe as we know it.

I think it was some time after my divorce from my first wife that summer solstice became something I strove to make special. To do something that made me feel spiritual.

And now it is known as my High Holy Day, and every year I celebrate it as the day I am closest to... I don't know what you would call it, because I've rather given up on the idea of a soul at times. Transcendant? I suppose that's the best word for it, and it does contain an element of hypocrisy. I am formally an agnostic in that I allow for the possibility of some sort of god-force as a creator of 'all'... I digress.

I'm not going to give a shit about the hypocrisy of it. It is part of my unique culture. I celebrate the summer solstice. For nobody's fuckin reasons but my own, it has become a special day for me.

So special that I broke up with Rachelle a week in advance of it (jun 14 2007, not that I'm counting days) so I would have the High Holy Day to focus on healing and beginning anew. And so special that I proposed to Laura on the solstice (2008) because I believed the relationship to be that auspicious (still do). But I wouldn't ever get married on the solstice because that would mean that it might contain a memory of loss or failure if she ever died or we divorced. It is my day, no one else's...

That's as I declare it should be. I love the solstice. I always will. I want to be able to be on the southern hemisphere for winter solstice as well. That's a big future goal of mine.

It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn