Flippant Gripes and Labyrinthian Gratitude

Flippant Gripes and Labyrinthian Gratitude: In summer I begin to gripe and wear increasingly larger hats. Courtesy & © Patrick Kelly, Photographer
In summer I begin to gripe and wear increasingly larger hats.
Courtesy & © Patrick Kelly, Photographer
I love the sun. Now, I don’t always like it, but I always do love it. It’s a relationship that is both iterative and consistent, built by years of experience and yet left open for surprises. It provides, draws me out, pushes me inside, and draws me out once more. Like the four valves of our hearts, the seasons each give new direction.

In winter, I seek it out and try and absorb as much vitamin D as I can. I can appreciate that it gives us nutrition, life, longevity. I inhale as I look up and if I try hard enough I think I can gently photosynthesize. If I get real desperate, I’ll make my optometrist’s scorn roll out of my mind as I play some lighthearted sunstare, burning a gentle nimbus of black into what was once a perfectly fine astigmatism.

In spring I feel as though I can count myself among the ilk of flowering trees, alien hybrids in their own right. The sun bakes my own winterlogged bark, and I too reach forth beyond my skin. I use my palms as leaves stretching upwards and my warmed respite as flowers. I allow myself to feel awakened, thawed beyond simply thawing, and into growth. I exhale as I look up and warm my bones by that big yellow fire in the sky.

In summer I begin to gripe and wear increasingly larger hats. I deeply feel what semi-arid means, and eventually begin to ponder if that’s just marketing against the surely true aridity I feel. My dormant joints rediscover their ranges of motion and youthful play blooms perennial in my lexicon. And, it gets hot. Hot hot. My love, though, does not wane as I seek increasingly dense shade through the season. This love persists in the dog days of summer because while I pant in lily-skinned evapotranspiration, a life of hard winters reminds me to hyperphage my vitamins while I can. I inhale as I look around and see the life which feeds from the sun just as I do. We are all in the same boat.

In fall my solar binge takes full stride, paired neatly with cool winds foreboding the coming darkness. Just how summer mirrors winter, fall mirrors spring as I stock up and prepare for another winter. As want gives way to need, I try and push the sun into my own roots. I store memory, reflection, and nostalgia in one cellar, and hard cider, wild berry jams, and garden salsa in the other. I exhale and stoke the coals which will carry me to yet another spring.

So this spring as you, too, are finding your own leaves and flowers bend to the fresh-stoked fire in the sky, I invite you to reflect upon your own relationship with the sun. See how it molds you. Feel your gripes as flippant and your gratitude as labyrinthian. Hear how it draws the world in and out of breath. Even if you don’t always like it, discover how you love it.

I’m Patrick Kelly, and I’m Wild About Utah.
 
Credits:

Images: Courtesy & © Patrick Kelly
Audio: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/
Text:    Patrick Kelly, Director of Education, Stokes Nature Center, https://www.logannature.org
Included Links: Patrick Kelly & Lyle Bingham, Webmaster, WildAboutUtah.org

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Posts by Patrick Kelly

Stokes Nature Center in Logan Canyon, https://www.logannature.org/

Equinox, or Equilux?

Equinox, or Equilux: Seasons Courtesy NASA https://www.weather.gov/dvn/Climate_Astronomical_Seasons
Seasons
Courtesy NASA
https://www.weather.gov/dvn/Climate_Astronomical_Seasons
We raced west toward home from the high plains, trying to beat the heavy snow that had been forecasted for Labor Day evening. Finally in the canyon—the revelation that seasons had passed while we were away. Temperatures plummeted, and the forests reacted. Favorite stands of aspens were already aglow above that familiar bend in the river. Meteorological fall had promptly arrived.

Its astronomical counterpart—the autumnal equinox—is a bit of a misnomer. The word equinox is our late Middle English iteration of the Latin term for “equal night,” but, astronomically speaking, this isn’t exactly true. The equinox is the single moment when the Earth’s axis is pointing neither toward nor away from the sun, providing entire hemispheres equal portions of light. This year’s autumnal equinox occurs at precisely 7:30 AM on Tuesday, September 22nd, and though daylight and night will share almost equal portions of the clock that day, they don’t split it evenly until two or three days later on what is called the ‘equilux’, meaning “equal light.”

Earth Orbit - With Date Spans, Courtesy National Weather Service (NWS)
Earth Orbit – With Date Spans
Courtesy National Weather Service (NWS)
https://www.weather.gov/abq/clifeatures_springequinox
It works like this. We count daytime from the moment the sun peeks above the horizon to the moment it sinks below. But, of course, the sun isn’t a light switch. We have several minutes of twilight before the sun rises and after it sets thanks to the lens-like refraction provided by our atmosphere. So, on the day of the equinox, those several minutes of twilight before sunrise and after sunset offset the equal exposure of the sun’s rays to our hemisphere by a small margin, giving us a tad more daylight than night. The equilux has to wait for Earth’s tilt to allow darkness to catch up.

But wait. It gets a little more complicated. Because the Earth’s axis begins tilting away from the sun immediately following the autumnal equinox (or toward it following the vernal equinox), different latitudes will experience the equilux at different intervals. As a rule, the closer one is to the equator, the longer they will wait for the equilux to occur in the fall and the sooner it will arrive in the spring. That is, unless you live within 5 latitudinal degrees of the equator. Then, sadly, you don’t get an equilux at all, ever, because you always have more than twelve hours of daylight.

Depending on where you live here in Utah, you will experience the equilux sometime on September 25th or 26th. So, this week, take out your stopwatch, and turn your eyes skyward.

I’m Josh Boling, and I’m Wild About Utah!

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy Weather.gov, US National Weather Service(NWS), https://www.weather.gov/dvn/Climate_Astronomical_Seasons
Photos: Courtesy
Sound: Courtesy & Copyright Friend Weller, Utah Public Radio
Text: Josh Boling, 2020

Sources & Additional Reading

The Equinox Isn’t What You Think It Is, PBS Digital Studios, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVDCsXUygEw

Kher, Aparna, Equinox: Equal Day and Night, Almost, https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/equinox-not-equal.html

City of North Logan, Utah, USA — Sunrise, Sunset, and Daylength, September 2020, Time and Date AS, https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/@7173983

Seasons, SciJinks, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, https://scijinks.gov/review/solstice/seasons/

Which Pole is Colder?, Climate Kids, The Earth Science Communications Team, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, https://climatekids.nasa.gov/polar-temperatures/

Earth’s Seasons – Equinoxes and Solstices – 2018-2025, The U.S. Naval Observatory, Astronomical Applications Department, https://www.weather.gov/media/ind/seasons.pdf

Changing seasons, Climate Resource Collections, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/climate/changing-seasons

Boling, Josh, A Solstice Vignette, Wild About Utah, December 16, 2019, https://wildaboututah.org/a-solstice-vignette/

Equinoxes, National Geographic, https://youtu.be/kaG6PTVrFP4

What is an Equinox? National Geographic, https://youtu.be/enlih8M5DN0

The Autumnal Equinox is Near, Watch the Skies Blog, NASA, https://blogs.nasa.gov/Watch_the_Skies/tag/equinox/


A Solstice Vignette

Winter Trail Courtesy Pixabay
Winter Trail
Courtesy Pixabay
In the frigid dark of long winter nights, we tell stories—stories of thievery, heroism, and light. Raven, Maui, and Koo-loó-pe, the hummingbird. They are all said to have taken back the sun from too much darkness for their people, and their deeds remain the whispered subjects around campfires that lead up to the winter solstice. I’d like to tell a story of my own about our calendar’s longest, darkest night and our relationship with it.

The first archaeological evidence we have that point to organized observances of the winter solstice come from the Neolithic period—that era from about 12,000 to 6,500 years ago which hastened the Stone Age into those of Copper and Bronze. The Neolithic coincided with the invention of farming in the Near East; and on the heels of farming came the necessity of a calendar, upon which the new agrarian economy was utterly dependent—for delineating seasons, planting and harvesting crops, and monitoring food stores over winter. We looked to the sky, of course, as we always had, for such insights into the survival of our species. We found familiar patterns there—the ebb and flow of darkness and light that came with the ever changing arc of the sun. From north to south the sun wanders, from light to dark and warm to cold. We built shrines to its movement. You know their names: Stonehenge and Newgrange; the Goseck circle and Chaco Canyon’s sun dagger. Each culture would create its own method of tracking, observing, and then of celebrating. We built tools, and then shrines, and then we built mythology.

The Neolithic agrarian economy lived by the sun. As darkness fell on wintery fields, our Stone Age ancestors shared stories about that moment when the light would return, hoping that their characters could hasten the sun. Reverence is a powerful thing. It informs the stories we tell about ourselves–stories of existence balanced on moments. We revere the return of the light when the night is at its darkest and longest. That’s when we send Raven, Maui, or an exuberant Miwok hummingbird to bring the sun back from too much darkness. That’s the mythology, at least.

A Solstice Vignette: The Seasons Courtesy US NWS
The Seasons
Courtesy US NWS
Astronomically speaking, the winter solstice is ephemeral. In the northern hemisphere, it occurs at the exact moment when the northern portion of the Earth’s axis is tilted directly away from the sun at its farthest point. This year, in the Mountain West, that moment is Saturday, December 21st, at 9:19pm. But astronomy’s geometries and physics are only part of the tale. Our stories are told with an affinity for more than just practical science.

Solstice means “to be still,” to wait for the return of the light. We attach great meaning to it. The cluster of holidays we have in winter worldwide are evidence enough of that. Every culture recognizes, in its own way, the vast significance of this fleeting moment; and those observances connect us through time to the ancestors that first looked up—marking time, checking dates, counting bushels until the next harvest. The solstice is a moment we barely notice, but one that bears immense anticipation. We move right through it at the speed of time—then tell our stories to lend meaning to that time spent moving, from the light through to darkness and back again.

I’m Josh Boling, and I’m Wild About Utah!

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy US NWS
Photos: Courtesy Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/photos/snow-weather-trail-winter-autumn-834111/
Sound: Courtesy & Copyright Josh Boling & Friend Weller
Text: Josh Boling, 2018

Sources & Additional Reading

Astronomy Picture of the Day, NASA, https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap071222.html

Solstices & Equinoxes for Ogden (Surrounding 10 Years), TimeandDate.com, https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/seasons.html?n=4975

Byrd, Deborah, All you need to know: December solstice, EarthSky.org, Dec 15, 2019, https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-december-solstice