Tag: seasons

Leave My Clock Alone!

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

When Congress resumes, they will have a great many weighty issues to discuss.  I invite them, and you as their constituents, to take a break from the weight of the world and grapple instead with a seemingly simple problem—Daylight Saving Time. Sometime between bedtime and wake-up time Saturday night and Sunday morning we are instructed to turn our clocks back an hour. One hour of daylight will be subtracted from the early evening and revert to morning. People will be late for church. On Monday, school children may have a bit of sunlight when they meet the school bus.  Golfers will find their evening game curtailed. Supposedly DST saves energy, but the evidence is slim.

Fortunately, most of our clocks will be reset automatically, but I still have three clocks to reset in my kitchen, my bedroom and my car.  I do so under protest, because I don’t like confusing my body by messing with my biorhythms. Apparently that attitude is shared by a substantial majority of our fellow citizens. According to a NORC poll in 2025, 47% of the population oppose changing the clocks, while only 12% are in favor. The other 40% don’t really care.  A YouGov survey from 2026 found that 67% of us do not like the twice a year change, while only 19% thought it was a good idea. Ending the clock reset sounds like a slam dunk, a real people pleaser. 

But then comes the hitch.  The two polls registered 56% and 51% in favor of keeping  our clocks on Daylight Saving Time year-round instead of mid-March to November, while 42% and 43% preferred Eastern Standard Time.  Too close for comfort.  That’s just a little more than half who will be happy and a little less than half will be unhappy. School children will have a better shot at surviving to get on the bus, while golfers will resent no evening relaxation after a hard day’s work. The New England states, where it gets dark by 4:30 pm in the winter, are considering a switch to Atlantic time.  Northern states in general are more heavily impacted by the choice of DST or EST than Southern states, because their daylight is shorter,  so maybe they should have more say in the decision

What’s the answer? It calls for some creative thinking.  Perhaps school should start later, making school bus pickups safer.  Kids get a little more time to wake up before their first class. Or maybe employers, public and private, need to be more flexible about working hours.

There are no simple questions. If Congress can’t find a way out of the DST/EST challenge, how are they supposed to address the war in Iran, tariffs, the budget deficit, inflation, immigration, and the pending threat to the future of Social Security?

Aren’t you glad you didn’t run for Congress?

Celebrating the Solstice

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

This essay is a repeat of last year’s solstice blog with an addendum.

Next Sunday is both Father’s Day and the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.  In Australia, New Zealand, and most of South America, it is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  There they huddle before a warm fire at this solstice and celebrate the December solstice at the beach. Here in the Northwest quadrant of the globe, we have picnics and celebrate Fathers’ Day. Why is Fathers’ Day so closely connected to the summer solstice? Perhaps because, in Celtic mythology, the sun God is at the peak of his powers, even as the mother Goddess is pregnant with his child who will be born at the winter solstice. After the solstice, the Sun God begins a long descent into aging and death before being reborn in December.

The four sky holidays (equinoxes and solstices) are celebrated with bonfires—spring at dawn, summer at midday, autumn at dusk, winter at midnight.  Do these times of day remind you of Easter, (sunrise service), Fourth of July picnics (two weeks past the summer solstice), Trick or treat (five weeks past the fall equinox), and midnight mass (winter solstice)? If so, you have penetrated the Celtic roots of some of our non-biblical religious and secular customs of honoring the rhythm of the earth.

The ancient Celts, from whom many Americans trace their descent, observed eight evenly spaced holidays.  Solstices and equinoxes were dictated by the rotation of the earth around the sun, while the four cross-quarter holidays were earth-centered. Males were associated with sun and sky, women with moon and earth.

We modern humans are largely disconnected from these rhythms of earth and sky, with air-conditioned buildings and food from the grocery store that can be frozen or refrigerated.  We can eat blueberries and watermelon year-round even if it means shipping them long distance from Chile or other points far south. Change of clothing is one of the few acknowledgements we make of changing seasons as we swap coats and sweaters for T-shirts and bathing suits.

And yet the pull of the rhythm of the seasons is still strong. The urge to plant is evident in the spring, even if we are more often planting for beauty than for sustenance. Recreation moves outdoors in the warm summer months, while long winter nights are a time to huddle in front of the fireplace, alternating with snow sports in the short daytimes in more northern parts of the hemisphere.  We can try to insulate ourselves from nature, but we are in fact a part of nature and our bodies and hearts pulsate to its changes. We are also dependent on nature for all the resources that sustain us—food, and water, and electricity, and fossil fuels, metals and minerals,  plants and animals.

Each season brings us different gifts of both beauty and sustenance, challenge and opportunity.  If a single word unites these eight ancient holidays into a common thread, it should probably be gratitude.  Gratitude for rain and sun, soil and water, food and fuel, beauty and wonder. Eight chances to count your blessings and honor Mother Earth and Father Sky.  A joyous summer solstice to all my readers!

Another message can be derived from the Sky God’s story of growth and decline.  For humans, the cycle from birth to peak to decline and death is much shorter. Unlike the Sun God, we do not know what happens after death. Somewhere between the perpetually recurring cycle of the Sun God and mere mortals lie the rise and fall of empires. From Egyptian to Persian, Greek and Roman to Persian, Ottoman and British, not to mention empires of the Far East, all have risen, had their time in glory, and declined. During that peak in most empires, there were many wars, great inequality, suppression of citizens’ rights, and corruption. Less ambitious nations content to dwell within their parameters have often but not always fared better. Will this be the fate of the American empire, and what nation or nations wait in the wings to succeed us?

.

The Final Quarter

~ purplesage41 ~ 3 Comments

Poets, philosophers, and psychologists often compare the stages of our life with the turning of the year.  If we consider the seasons of our lives, this time of year is the final quarter—an appropriate metaphor from the football season! I assume that I will live to age 92, as my mother and her sister did.  If my schedule of quarters is correct, I am more than half way through the final quarter. These years have been marked by my second and final retirement, the loss of my husband and my dearest female friend, and by the usual changes of aging. I know that the final stage of life would test the resources that we have developed over many years of life, but I didn’t expect the test to be so sudden and so painful.

My middle daughter also pointed out that, starting at age 22 when my first child was born, I had been responsible for at least one other person and sometimes as many as four or five at a time.  Now I was only responsible for myself, a situation that is both liberating and challenging.. As Janis Joplin sang, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. I am in no hurry to see my life end, but I am also accepting my mortality.

Assuming that you do not fantasize about heaven with pearly gates and a gigantic family reunion, there are two very different ways to come face to face with the final quarter and the impending end of life.  One is from poet Robert Browning:  Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made.  Dylan Thomas sees it differently: Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. There is truth in both of them.  Browning sounds like a bit of a Pollyanna, and Dylan Thomas like a grumpy old man.

In his book Aging Well, George Vaillant identifies three tasks of old age.  They are integrity, generativity, and keepers of wisdom. Those mostly joyful and meaningful tasks can make this last quarter rich and fulfilling. 

Integrity means wholeness.  It means putting the pieces of our lives, past and present, into a framework that tells a meaningful story. I have always been a storyteller, like my mother before me, but even more so since I had grandchildren with whom to share family stories. Because my story does not stand alone. It is interwoven with my great-grandmother who marched for women’s suffrage and my sister who struggled with the uprootedness of being a military wife and the ancestral faith tradition of the early settlers of New England in which I was raised. It is interwoven with my husband’s family and my children and grandchildren and the many dear friends with whom I have shared my life.    If task of the first half of life is to create a separate identity, the last half of life calls us to reconnect, to find our place in the cycle of generations and the work of the world.

Generativity means mentoring the next generation, whether it is children of colleagues or church leaders or, in my case, teaching graduate students and empowering voters.  Even if we were mentors during our working years, it is different in the final quarter.  We are likely to be less competitive, less focused on proving our competence.  The people we may be called to mentor may be older or younger than before and they may need very different kinds of wisdom and patience o from us.  More listening, less talking. Like Yoda.

In the Hindu tradition, life is divided into four stages—the child, the student, the householder, and the spiritual seeker. At the end of the student stage, one is expected to assume the responsibilities of adult life—work, marriage, children, community.  But in the words of one Hindu text, when one’s hair has turned white and one has seen grandsons, it is time to abandon he life of the householder,to turn it over to the next generation, abandon material possessions, and seek the life of the spirit.  Being a contemplative hermit would be the highest expression of this calling.  But a guru also fits this mold, a keeper of wisdom who shares it not just with selected groups like grandchildren and students and patients and clients and friends and neighbors, but with whoever turns up in need of some wisdom.  

That wisdom is evoked at least in part by giving up our attachment to possessions.  I have noticed in myself and in many of my fellow travelers through life’s last quarter a change in how we approach to possessions, not so much stressing acquisition as cultivation, enjoyment, and letting go.  Living in a smaller space, giving things away, truly practicing the belief that less is more. Approaching the end of life with an attitude or acceptance and gratitude.  This kind of wisdom is shared with anyone we encounter, not consciously or intentionally but just by the way we live our lives.

At the same times, it is important for ourselves and others to live until we die.  To be kind and caring and helpful and engaged for as long as we can.  To keep on learning, living, loving, playing within the limits of our declining physical abilities.  To accept our limitations with grace and patience, two skills that those who follow us will need to notice and acquire.  Those of us who don’t put much stock in a concrete afterlife need to continue to the last breath our work of making heaven on earth, a place where human and other life forms can flourish and prosper.

All Saints Day

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

We, the living, are keepers of the memories

of those who came before

We all had parents, teachers, siblings, friends

Who are no longer present

But will live on as long

as we remember them.

We share the memories of good people

Who made a diffeer3nce in our common life

Great men and women whose prophetic voices

Called all back into covenant

With earth and fellow humans

and all living things..

Remembrance is our yearly payment

on the debt we owe

to those who blazed the path

on which we tread.

.