It's winter solstice, the shortest day of the year has arrived. A day for darkness to reign in its full black bloom and, at the same time, it is a day when we welcome the growing daylight hours. Our blogger Ladybird depicts solstice from the perspective of a tree.
All illustrations are borrowed from Moonlight books.
The tree stands defiant. Covered in silvery up-thrusting buds, it is undaunted by the wind that is tearing the last dull brown leaves from its branches. In Spring these buds will plump and burst into magnolia bloom even before the first leaves dot its branches once more.
Here we are in December. The shortest day of the year has arrived and yet these signs of Spring are there. Telling us of what? Of the ongoing cycle of death and life? This cycle, in which we as human beings are intimately involved, affects us in myriad ways. Year by year, each in our own season, we feel the springtime of youth, the full flowering of Summer, the fruitfulness of Autumn or the slow decline of shedding and leave taking in Winter – each mirroring our individual season.
All illustrations are borrowed from Moonlight books.
The tree stands defiant. Covered in silvery up-thrusting buds, it is undaunted by the wind that is tearing the last dull brown leaves from its branches. In Spring these buds will plump and burst into magnolia bloom even before the first leaves dot its branches once more.
Here we are in December. The shortest day of the year has arrived and yet these signs of Spring are there. Telling us of what? Of the ongoing cycle of death and life? This cycle, in which we as human beings are intimately involved, affects us in myriad ways. Year by year, each in our own season, we feel the springtime of youth, the full flowering of Summer, the fruitfulness of Autumn or the slow decline of shedding and leave taking in Winter – each mirroring our individual season.
Today there is winter at work, in the promise of these buds. As all seems dead and lifeless and swathes of sodden leaves gutter on the paths and clog the drains, as the reek of dampness and decay fills our nostrils, there it stands. The sprawling skeleton of a tree covered in bauble buds… A small miracle. The miracle promise of new life to come – as true and as real as the swelling bulbs beneath the earth that will soon erupt in green shoots. They are the harbingers of our darling daffodils, the harbingers of Spring.