The Longest Night of the Year

This winter feels different than others in recent memory and the feeling is a very interesting thing to contemplate.

Doing this blog brings thoughts from deep inside up to the light of conscious regard.  I know this night - longest of the year - is as far as I can go in darkness.  From here on out the days will get longer, slowly but surely.

I don't have to go in tomorrow - my schedule is very light for the next few days.  I do have a show to try to video but I'm not quite sure how to manage it.  We may well cancel it anyway.

Therefore it's tempting to stay up till dawn, to walk the watches of this longest night and to give space to the quiet thoughts from deep inside.

Still, those thoughts are already close at hand.  Spending so much time writing - both music and words - has called them up where I can think about them - cursing myself with a meta-sense of what's going on inside.

I like where I'm getting to.  I know I have occasional anxieties and sometimes they overwhelm me.  I wonder if my financial choices will work out.  I wonder if not going back to teaching was the right thing to do.  I wonder if my composing will get to where I want it to be.  I wonder if all my friendships are being well-served by my actions.  I wonder is working at the Orchard will let me be who I want to be.

The clarity of these questions - and the meta-sense of my feelings about them - are very close on a night like this.

There is another storm coming.  They're saying we could get almost sixteen inches of new snow on Sunday - only fifty-five minutes away at this point.  They're saying another storm is on the way Sunday night.

The snowfall will begin sometime in the next few hours.

Outside the cars are cleared off; some are surrounded by small snowbanks from not having been moved since last night's storm.  My car is in the garage and it's staying there.

The windchill is down to one below zero.

I suppose the biggest change is this: in years past I would have consciously wondered "how did we get here" but know, deep inside, every step Nature took to make this change.

Now I can describe that process and the capacity to see and create with that knowledge has changed what I know about what I see.

On this - the longest night of the year.