December 25, 2003

• About five years ago or so, when I had moved to Berkeley, the winter solstice came.

  Now, if you’re someone with religious and spiritual and philosophical proclivities such as myself, and you’re in Berkeley on the solstice day, you’re going to do what I did:

  Your friend comes and knocks on your door and wakes you up before sunrise, and you get in a tiny car with three other people you don’t really know all that well. You navigate your way through the huge houses on the west side of the Berkeley hills, getting lost a couple times in the process. Finally you find that state park the name of which I forget, and you drive through it. You try not to cringe too much on the winding hillside road, peering out the tiny rear window of this two-door econobox.

  And finally you come to a place on a hillside called Inspiration Point. And there, on the hillside, is a parking area and some picnic tables. And crowding the parking area and picnic tables, are hundreds of people. A ruffian band of neopagans, wiccans, spiritualists, new age wanderers, drum circle people, bondage people, tribal self-modification people, and people generally wearing black and denying that they live in the twentieth century. And some hapless joggers who just came there to run along the firebreak.

  There’s a band of morris dancers, wearing their finery. There’s a Green Man, covered head-to-toe with tiny foot-long tassles of green fabric, who the dancers insist is invisible. The dancers are trying to make a space in which to dance, because, well, that’s what this is really all about. They’re going to dance in the new sun.

  The sky is brightening. When you first got there, the crowded throng was engulfed in twilight mystery. Now, however, the world looks much more solar, open. Much less claustrophobic. The sun still hasn’t risen, however. Directly to the east is another range of hills, and from this vantage point, the sun won’t have risen until it pokes up from behind the very tallest peak in the range. Inspiration Point is, by accident, a solar observatory.

  People are drinking coffee. Loved ones are taking cups of coffee over to the dancers, who relish the warmth. It’s not all that cold, but they’re wearing breeches. Your friend approaches you with a cup. “Here, drink some of this. It’s reeeeeeeally good.” She smiles, and you remember why you were seduced out to this side of the continent.

  You share the cup. It’s true: It’s reeeeeeally good.

  The natives are getting restless. Judging by the pink clouds and blue sky, the sun should, by all rights, be considered as having risen. But it hangs behind the far hilltop, hiding, playing a little joke on us. A guy with a drum starts banging a rhythm on it, chanting and then banging and chanting again and so forth: “Hey sun!/Come on up!/Start up/The fucking new year!/It’s fucking COLD/And we need some warmth!/Hey sun!/We all came out/To see your new clothes/To hear your new song/And it’s fucking COLD!/So come on up!/And warm us up!/This coffee SUCKS!” ..and so forth. Finally, when he realizes the sun is just about to rise from behind the hill, he finds a relatively graceful way to stop singing his song.

  The sun is a brilliant corona around the top of the hill. The silver lining minus the cloud, and plus a hill, and minus the silver, and plus the gold, if you follow. It is the shadow cast by god. The top of the sun’s disc is almost peeking up over the hill, and the people are working themselves up into a frenzy. It’s hard to believe that so much excitement could be generated by a sunrise; it happens every day, after all. In fact, there is no such thing as a day without a sunrise, by definition.

  You’re thinking about all that kind of crap when the sun finally envelopes the top of the hill! It’s up! Another end to darkness! The mass of people cheer and hoot and holler and bang drums and play musical instruments! The dancers take their mark and welcome the sun the way the sun has been welcomed for generations, millenia, as long as people have noticed the changing seasons.

  Years later you’ll remember that one guy and his drum, pleading for the sun to rise on a new year, but you’ll utterly forget what the morris dance was like, except that it was like every other morris dance you’ve seen.

  • 4:32 am
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