LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD

JANUARY IS COMING, with its celebration of Janus, the two-faced god who looks in both directions. Janus or Ianus stood at the origin of time and guarded the very gates of heaven. Here is Janus Bifrons, with his two fronts, at the Vatican museums -- an image captured on Wikipedia.

According to the Wiki, Janus may be traced to Sumerian solar gods, where one twin faced southeast to greet the sun at the coming of winter, and the other twin faced northeast to greet summer. Eventually the two fused into a single body with two heads, facing in opposite directions.  Regardless of what details you believe, we clearly have a case of yin and yang -- each side contains and balances the other; there's no looking forward without looking back. At every transition we enter the new, but never without a backward glance.

And so today we ponder the past year. Because you can't just shut the door and start over.

Among some wondrous books I've been reading is the voluptuous The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock. It tells the amazing story of Mary Delany, who began her life's work at the age of 72 when she was inspired to capture an entire botanical garden, each patiently cut from hundreds of snippets of colored paper, then cut and fastidiously pasted onto black backgrounds.  If you haven't heard of this remarkable woman, I recommend her story and the book's the astonishing images of her nearly 1000 collages, now in the collection of the British Museum.

I love the lushness of this Papaver somniferum, the Oriental opium poppy. And her  portrait of Pancratium maritimum, or sea daffodil, offers an incredible elaboration on nature.

Mrs. Delany was a "late bloomer" in the best sense -- and her story provides a delicious role model for late bloomers everywhere. And it's especially apt on December 31: in tracing the arc of Mrs. Delany's life, Peacock observes how one phase builds upon another:

Wholesale throwing out only closes a door against the past... You have to sort through the details of the past in order to process what happened, and then to move ... [forward in a pattern of] slow growing, that layering upon layering that is growth in maturity.

That does NOT mean tomorrow is not a new slate. It is -- both a miraculous way to reset the counters, and a way to connect to one's best by applying the lessons and experience of earlier years.

That process is different for each of us.  Whatever your definition, may you be happy, healthy, and fully at ease in the coming year.

STILL CHRISTMAS

A FEW FLAKES DRIFTED slowly down on Christmas morning,  leaving a dusty sparkle on the ice of the lower pond.

As I shot the picture, I noticed that the wind had snapped another pine in the lower woods. Investigating, we found the downed trunk in several thoroughly rotten sections, with the telltale hen-of-the-woods mushrooms growing up the side.

Nature never takes a holiday.


And on the music system, Yo-Yo Ma's joyous holiday party of several years ago, a CD entitled  Songs of Joy and Peace. You can find pieces of its back story on MySpace and You Tube snippets, and can listen to samples of the finished product at the title link above.  It's wonderful music to play over the holidays.  Great joyous riffs, punctuated with endless variations on Dona Nobis Pacem. 


No matter what holidays you celebrate, what we all share is this common gateway to the new year and the rising sun. It's a new chapter, a new start.  May the coming year be a good one for you.

A ROSE FOR CHRISTMAS

WHEN I WAS AN EVEN LESS EXPERIENCED GARDENER, I believed the catalogs and magazines that assured me the Christmas rose, Helleborus niger, would brighten my Christmas garden. Over time,  I learned that in New England it blooms somewhere near Easter (depending on the moon and the vernal equinox, which combine to make Easter the most movable of holidays).  But this year a local market has outwitted Mother Nature by stocking potted plants they say we can enjoy now and move outdoors "when the ground thaws."

I have a wonderful assortment of hellebores, including some treasures from Heronswood, and I'd love to have this beauty join them. Wish me luck. Gardening is always an adventure.

So this is my experiment for the season -- along with the snippet from an awesome four-foot coleus I got from Cecile, a wonderful local gardener. When I admired its dramatic show in a large pot near her front door, she promptly reached over and snapped off a generous shoot for me.

But you know, even if I don't manage to keep the hellebore viable in the dry heat of the house in winter, it's a delight to have it at Christmastime.

SODDEN SOLSTICE

DRIVING OUT ON SOLSTICE MORNING, I found the world new-washed by the middle-of-the-night gully washers.  All was fresh and green – more mid-April than winter solstice. And it reminded me that every event (paradoxically – or is it?) contains its opposites. Very yin and yang. The strength in the weakness, the softness in the sturdy. The wisdom of the I Ching: there's always another side to consider.

THE DAY WAS balmy, holding its breath almost, while shoppers jockeyed for parking spots, butchers and fishmongers darted behind counters wrapping parcels, and the merchants breathed a sigh of relief to see their shelves emptied.

In the evening, a widespread band of rain moved in with intent to soak, and it has continued all night. I've come to depend on our faithful NOAA display to understand the greater context for the scene outside the door. Beneath the leaf mulch, the spring bulbs should be sending out healthy roots.

Across the bridge, the mosses are a mottled carpet of green and rust in the woods -- a perfect flooring for the bare season, covering the earth until the snow arrives.

THE SHORTEST DAY?

THE CHRISTMAS REVELS, mentioned yesterday, commemorate the darkest days of the year, and mankind's immemorial efforts to "bring back" the disappearing sun.

But is this really the "shortest day?" Perhaps not, when you look at the "hours of daylight" for our zip code:

Date	Sun Rise(AM)	Sun Set (PM)	Daylight (Hrs/Min)
12/17	7:08	4:14	9:06
12/18	7:09	4:14	9:05
12/19	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/20	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/21	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/22	7:11	4:16	9:05
12/23	7:12	4:17	9:05
12/24	7:12	4:17	9:05
12/25	7:13	4:18	9:05
12/26	7:13	4:19	9:06
12/27	7:13	4:19	9:06
12/28	7:13	4:20	9:07
12/29	7:14	4:21	9:07
12/30	7:14	4:22	9:08
12/31	7:14	4:22	9:08
1/1	7:14	4:23	9:09

So every day from 12/18 to 12/25 is the same “short” length, 9 hours and 5 minutes (yes, certainly, the seconds may vary). But look how flat it is: it takes TEN DAYS for the daylight hours to rise again to 9 hours and 6 minutes. It’s a “time out of time” when change ceases to happen. (The same thing happens at the summer solstice in June, when the long days are with us for a 10-day period.)

The other notable trend is that sunrise comes later each day throughout this period although, blessedly, the afternoon sun lingers longer each day. And perhaps the best news is that we gain a full hour of daylight during January, which pushes the sunset back past 5 PM.

But in the meantime, we can enjoy the delights of the season -- the magic of snowfall, sunshine on new snow, enjoying a brisk walk or a cross-country ski, then returning indoors to warm by the fire, to read and laugh and plan for the warmer days ahead. And savor that evocative phrase from the I Ching:

I have a good goblet

I'll share it with you.

BUMPS IN THE NIGHT

Winter rumbled in at 12:30 a.m., with lightning and window-rattling thunder -- more like a summer night than the start of the cold season.  Ponds are already overflowing, and the neighbors' vernal pools are at higher levels than they ever are in late April -- missing only the tadpoles and other creatures that populate them in the spring.

Wave after wave of heavy rain pounded on the roof, nearly drowning out the sound of the town's emergency  horn:  1 -- 4 --- 7, the code for Sunset Road. Shortly afterward the cry of sirens as volunteer firefighters responded to the call. Lightning must have struck.

Commenting on the strange weather, someone recently observed that the North Pacific rain forest conditions seem to be migrating to New England. I for one am glad this isn't snow, for we'd be shoveling out a couple of feet tomorrow

DAYS DWINDLE DOWN

A TIME FOR KEEPING CLOSE TO HOME as nights are long and days are brisk. There's ice on the pond, and the evening brings owls' lonely hoots from the woods as they seek companions for the winter night.

This year we managed to get to Cambridge before the Christmas holiday to see the original Christmas Revels (which has now spread to Washington D.C., Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Houston and other points) for a rollicking three-hour "time out of time" that opened the holiday celebrations with great cheer.  

And Ludwig von Beethoven had the good grace to be born on December 16, which led our local public broadcasting station, WGBH, to throw a gala birthday bash of works well-known and rare. They've posted a video of a delightful WoO (work without opus, not part of the official Beethoven catalog) 152 No. 8, "Come Draw We Round the Cheerful Ring" with renowned tenor William Hite in an arrangement for piano, cello and mandolin. And the entire concert, which includes a fabulous performance of the "Les Adieux" piano sonata No. 26 by Gilles Vonsattel, as well as a memorable Hite-Vonsattel rendering of the song cycle "An Die Ferne Geliebte," is available in an audio-on-demand link at the same website. We were fortunate to be sitting in the second row of the visually and aurally gorgeous Fraser performance studio, but enjoy recapturing it from the Web.

There's a sense of bustle this year, as folks who've trimmed back in recent seasons are engaging the short-day season with great gusto -- to drive the darkness away.