sea, sea puede

Bowls of beauty!

Webby glass, spilled off the ladle

Cobalt plate

A very elegant warehouse!

It is wet in Humboldt, following the quake. The Raining Baby returns…

My aunt Sue’s winter fairy, artisan unknown

The winter holidays can be a beautiful time, full of mirth and coziness, cooking and being together. They can also be tense-making and grief-awakening.

Especially in a time of recession, the holidays raise questions of how we will make it through winter and into the new year. For some in our community, winter is a long thought — they aren’t sure where or what their next meal will be. For many of us, there are questions of how to juggle bills, and whether our jobs are secure.

It can be very hard to be playful when you’re not sure how those presents will get under a tree. It can be hard to be mirthful when you are alone, and there isn’t any together to be.

Solstice (which comes a few days before the Christian holiday) is the darkest, longest night of the year. And Solstice is simultaneously the promise that earth will keep spinning, that the bounty and beauty of spring will return, nourished by winter rain and snow. It’s both a recognition of needed dark, and of relief in the light.

I hope that we all find enough mirth and joy and hope and faith and delight and strength to make it through our darkness, into the returning day. That in the unlit periods, we do not forget to dream.

The Wiyot Island rested amongst a luminous Humboldt Bay as we returned from Blue Ox on Saturday.