Stilgherrian » winter-solstice

Winter Solstice Meditation

Stilgherrian — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:21:28 +0000

The exact moment of Winter Solstice was 9.59am Sydney time. The week was far too hectic to organise a proper ritual of Sunreturn before dusk last night. Instead, in an impromptu meditation, this crisp Saturday morning sees my tiny pearl of tealight flame battling an irregular, gentle breeze.

I protect it with my cupped hands, and smile. I can always re-light it if it blows out. No-one will notice the ceremonial faux pas but me.

Breathe. Listen…

To the west, just visible past the straggling row of poplars, the neat-toothed Protestant lads of Newington College surge across the neat-mown grass in their own, more muscular ritual. Rugby! 14-year-old elbow meets 14-year-old face! The small but vocal crowd cheers the violence! The family of three kookaburras which lives near the original school building can just be heard cackling above their roar.

Closer, more birds. A magpie does that impossible double-note achromatic thing in a vastly complex carol. And does it again, just because he can. An Australian raven croaks languidly, I can’t see quite where. A dozen noisy miners squabble in the tree next door — that big tree you can see from the satellite photos. A pair of rainbow lorikeets screeches past in search of flowers. A squadron of 30 or more corellas squawks and swirls amongst the eucalypts where the creek once flowed.

Breathe. Look down…

A single scarlet poinsettia leaf lies abandoned on the mossy paving, still covered with a hundred dew drops. I pick it up, idly turn it. A hundred unique but identical crystal-worlds catch the sunlight in a hundred unique but identical ways. I put the leaf down, before I lose myself in those worlds.

Artemis, tailless and camouflage-striped in her winter coat, stalks the pathway, pretending to hunt. She looks annoyed that it’s still too cold for there to be any sign of skinks to chase. She always looks annoyed. She notices me noticing, turns her head and closes her eyes. See nothing, nothing seen.

(Apollo, meanwhile, is spending the morning as he usually does: curled up inside on my hooded jacket, oblivious. Later, he’ll wash, sleep, wash and perhaps, if he has the energy, sleep some more.)

Suddenly a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 747 tears the sky asunder. Its polished white belly glistens, close enough to tickle. I read the fine print on its undercarriage tyres, notice a few spots of oil which should be wiped off. It dodges a tree, hops over the neighbour’s grey-tiled roof — neatly avoiding their ratty TV aerial and their two-metre Greek-receiving satellite dish — and drops its wheels onto runway 16R. There’s a loud, throaty Rolls-Royce roar as it brakes to prevent an embarrassing splash into Botany Bay.

Just like it does every Saturday morning.

The vortex wake swishes and swirls in frequency sweeps that’d shame a techno musician. One day that vortex really will open the stargate. Today, though, even on the Solstice, it just blows out my candle. Or maybe it was just the breeze gusting. A thin streamer of grey smoke — then nothing except the stub of a wick reflected in quickly-hardening wax.

A dog barks somewhere in the next street. A hotted-up sedan revs inefficiently and spins its wheels. The moment is over.

My gunpowder green tea has been made too strong. I make the same mistake every time. Every time.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Winter Solstice Name Day 25

Stilgherrian — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 23:59:59 +0000

“Oh, no mate, I wasn’t Stilgherrian until after that was taken. For my student card, so that’d be… March, maybe February. Stilgherrian wasn’t until Winter Solstice…”

25 years ago today!

Daggy photo, eh? Am I scared or was I trying for cool and moody, somehow? Scared, I reckon. I was too nerdy to even know how to look moody, let alone actually achieve a significant level of floppy-haired angst. Now Stephen… now he pulls that off so well. But then he lives in Melbourne, it’s “of the place”.

Sydney doesn’t have the sandstone Victorian for a fully grey, Londonesque, Londonangstridden pout, 30% eye shadow and 70% the precisely-edited slow-motion curl of a designer black trench coat. Not with any genuine sense of ennui, anyway.

In the words of Ultravox:

A cool empty silence
The warmth of your hand and a cold grey sky
It fades to the distance…

Ah yes!

This means nothing to me
This means nothing to me
Oh, Vienna

Melbourne did the “faded grand city” thing a century ago. The richest city on the planet except London, thanks to a handy gold rush. But Imperial Glory fades when the cash runs out. After the high, the comedown must’ve been harsh.

But they’ve recovered.

Melbourne is self-confident, assured of its place in history. They hosted the Commonwealth Games knowing they’d hosted them before and they’ll host them again. They are not troubled by noisome fools.

Eddie Maguire is as the piss-stains of a mouse to this Grand Old Dame. He, too, shall pass. Dame Edna will be remembered, Bert will be remembered, Eddie shall not.

But Sydney!

Ah, Sydney is an amateur peroxide hooker at the end of a long, long night. The booze and pills have long since run out. The ashtrays are overflowing and soggy, the sun’s coming up and the dawn light reveals unpleasant things on the linoleum. Only some of which are clothed, and none of which know the names of any of the others, or how they got there.

But Sydney, she’s still dancin’.

Fuck I love Sydney!

I used to dance, you know, back when I wrote about dance music and played it on the radio. A decade and more ago, a decade and more after the photo. But I never had dress sense.

Some poorly-repressed memory reminds me that shirt was pale yellow. Calling it “repressed lemon” won’t save it.

“I never had dress sense,” that’s a laugh! Of course I didn’t. In 1981 I was busily getting distinctions in Computing Science III, you can’t get nerdier.

But, nerdy or not, I became Stilgherrian. And committed myself to two and half decades of explaining “No, I don’t have a surname” and “Yes, that is unusual” and “Good heavens, two plus two does equal four, I’ve never thought of it that way before.”

Two and a half decades of people not being able to spell.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Great Techno, and Check My Patch

Stilgherrian — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:23:29 +0000

The Solstice begins with a chance pleasure. Extraordinarily fine community broadcaster FBi has just put online the audio and video of “Blackness of the Sea”, a cruisey tune from Deepchild who, as they accurately put it, is “one of Australia’s most respected producers of leftfield dance music”.

Download. Listen. Enjoy. You’ll also see my local patch, because the video was shot in Newtown in Sydney, same postcode as me here in Enmore. I can spot about 50% of the locations so far.