Solstice, The Internal Shift

You don't always have to mark an occasion with an elaborate ritual, or even a simple one. This year I really felt an internal shift during solstice, as if the season itself rotated somewhere deep inside my heart. The evening of the 21st of December I felt anxious and restless. I worried about next year and the pressure to re-invent myself as an artist, to build up from where I've left off this year. Comments other people said came back to haunt me. Should I have trusted that person? What did that phrase really mean? I was second-guessing my professional and personal relationships. I felt overwhelmed by the task ahead, given the lack of arts funding and the weakened respect for artists in an increasingly conservative climate.

The next day I got out of bed to get breakfast for Ules and then walked down the hill to get a physical therapy treatment. It was a beautiful and gentle foggy morning, with all the edges of the city softened and buffered by the mist. Joseph gently worked on getting me to ease the tension out of my painful lower back, my solid neck and shoulders and clenched jaw, and the clouds started to lift, literally and metaphorically.

In the afternoon I made stuffed acorn squash for a potluck, toasting the hazelnuts for the stuffing, releasing their fragrant oils. We walked to our friend's house with a bottle of cava and two pans of squash warm out of the oven. "Can I come too?" a neighbor joked as we stopped for a red light and she caught a whiff of our offering. We took Ules and his friend to the light show at VanDusen gardens and I watched the babies in strollers break into smiles as wide as their chubby faces after their toques which had fallen over their eyes were pulled up to reveal thousands and thousands of tiny lights wrapped around trees, fences and bushes. (I like the floodlights better, myself. I say go for the drama.) The boys drank hot chocolate and we picked up a bag of kettle-popped popcorn to go.

Back at our friend's house we feasted on recipes a la Nigella Lawson. Fun party food with a retro flair--spicy popcorn and pecans, cocktail weinies with mustard, and monte-cristo type sandwiches. My squash was from the wrong decade, so it wished it had worn a different party dress, being more Partridge Family than Mad Men. I didn't get the memo, people! There was a suave leek and potato soup and a nice zippy coleslaw with both green and purple cabbage. Dessert was from the Fanny Farmer cookbook "with the gold cover"--some kind of toffee meringue butter square that we all lusted after. It was the first party of the season that I felt I'd over-ate, which is always a good sign! A sign of Christmas past, anyway. We kvetched about the approaching 5 ring circus, worried over H1N1, joked about H1N1, and warmed our tootsies by the fire. Lovely. My friend gave me a big hug when we left and even though my son was having a complete meltdown because he was over-sugared and tired, I felt warmed and more hopeful.

Today I'm on the upswing again. Lois invited me to make cookies and heck, she'd already made them so we ate them with her beautiful thick and rich chai--chewy citrusy speculaas and spicy pfefferneuse. We compared recipes. She decided to put ground almonds in her pfefferneuse. Lois's son said that my version would be more like his oma's if they were aged and made rock hard. Ha! I played with Lois' delicate new grey kitty called ash and we watched her new video production about the Means of Production projects from this year. Being with Lois always makes me feel better about the world at the best of time, but as we sipped our nip of Grey Monk Optima I thanked the stars for having such a great friend. A showed up with a Polaroid camera and took a picture of Ash and I which I now have on my fridge to remind myself that the world is turning towards the light again. May you all feel the warmth and lightness of solstice in your lives.