Searching for Meaning in a Season of Ugh

My inbox overfloweth with promotions for dealing with holiday stress and depression. Again.

Covid may have done us a few favors, really. Maybe what it did was help us, by forcing us to stay the hell home for a year, to learn that the holidays, as celebrated in Materialist-Dominator Culture, are really not all they are cracked up to be. Maybe spending time at home with our most intimate and chosen family is better than … the alternative.

I would rather see my family in October, or May, when the weather is glorious and it’s perfectly safe to travel, and there aren’t a zillion people competing for space and air, and the prices for travel and lodging aren’t ridiculously inflated because They Can. When maybe there are concerts with normal music out in lovely greenspaces and nobody is frantic for any reason. When people can go have a picnic, or go hiking, or check out local museums and poke about in fusty but fun old antique shops and (deep breaths now) interesting book shops. Just because, not Because Christmas Fucking Cheer Dammit!

I’d rather spend soft, easy quality time with the people I love and not have to put on a feast and a holiday production.

It’s a huge waste of energy and resources – personally, financially, and environmentally. Yes, it’s lovely to see family at special times, but really? When the weather is turning to shit and our immunity is at its lowest, we’re going to have a giant international stress festival? Hard. Pass.

Holidays should be festive and lovely, of course, and that requires effort. But it shouldn’t be soul crushing.

Let’s take a ride in the Way-Back Machine. 500 years before Stonehenge, around 3000 BCE. In what we now call Wales, on some horribly inhospitable marshland, a Bluestone circle was erected, which marked some very important seasonal and solar events; most importantly, sunrise on Summer Solstice, and sunset on Winter Solstice. Those stones were subsequently moved – sometime around 2500 BCE – to Salisbury Plain in the southwest of England, and erected in an almost identical circle there. Why? Because there was a 500 yard-long trackway (give or take) that faced bang on into sunrise on Summer Solstice morning and sunset on Winter Solstice eve. Yes. A natural feature, left by glacial movement from the Ice Age, but clear as anything, and those people knew it was important to move their circle of stones to that very location – and so they did, approximately 80 stones between 2 and 5 tons each, pulled over 150 miles on wooden sledges. By stone age humans.

Why? Because Summer Solstice sunrise marked the division between the sleeping time, the time of darkness and death, into the waking time, the time of growth and warmth and plenty; and the Winter Solstice sunset marked the entrance into the Mystery Time, the most sacred of all times, the dying time, the sleeping time, the most dangerous time of the year when life and death danced dirty and slow, and a hush lay over the whole world. And that amazing trackway pointed straight at both of them. Coincidence? Or … something else?

What if … Nature was running on pure instinct and the pressures of place and climate and not really sentient – until humans suddenly happened. We are a part of Nature, and at this point, we are the only species that has the mental capacity to understand itself and the world around it through observation, expression, and experiment (though only just; the whales and dolphins are turning out to be way more sentient than we thought). What if Nature, striving to understand Herself through sentience, observation, expression, and experimentation, arranged for that trackway to be left just there to be found by our wandering ancestors?

The Universe is both teeming with life, and empty of life. What could be considered life comprises something like .000000001 percent of all matter in the Universe, and yet life is tenacious and ferocious and determined, and simply bursting with the Will to Be. We are made of stuff that exploded out of dying stars, so we’re cosmic creatures, part of Nature that’s bigger than one single planet, or even one solar system, or one galaxy. Space, the infinite (well, maybe just really, really, really unfathomably big) Universe we call home, is Nature, too. Not just Earth. So yes, we are some kind of manifestation of Cosmic impulses to strive, to live, to be aware.

Biologists, most of them anyway, are convinced that life is merely a chemical process, there’s no magic anything that sparks life, no godlike intervention necessary. Biologists are creating life out of chemicals in laboratories, and that life is responding to the environments they create around it. It is adapting and evolving, and they are watching it in real time. No God need be bothered. It’s not sentient, or even remotely complex. But it’s life.

And so were we, once. Microbes and single-celled organisms. Tiny, blobby, sticky, slimy … and we got more complex, we adapted, we evolved, over hundreds of millions of years, we became .000000001 percent of the Universe. And here we are, looking back at the Universe, on the verge of understanding how it works, how it began, and where We really came from. And on the verge of destroying ourselves, too, sadly. We are wonderful, terrible things. We are Nature trying to understand all that She is capable of. We are in fact fucking special, way more special than if we were created by some god with a god complex. Can you even conceive of how special we are? I can nearly grasp at the very hem of the garment of understanding, and it makes my brain wobble.

If you’re searching for meaning, this is some pretty heady stuff.

We are made of Star Stuff that’s many billions of years old, seeking to understand the nature of Nature; Life examining Life itself, just .0000000001 percent of the All; waking up and finding joy in Being, in learning and creating and expressing and loving and understanding. And we’ve been marking the movement of our own Sun for thousands upon thousands of years, Summer sunrise and Winter sunset, deepening our connection to the greatest cycles of Life on this tiny, fragile planet. Thousands upon thousands of years. Of course we want to celebrate! It’s in our DNA to celebrate, because we are Nature – the very sentient part of Nature.

So this year, amid the chaos and the stress, step away for a little while and simply allow yourself to breathe in the ancient truth of what we are, and who we are. A sentient being made of billion year-old star stuff deserves nothing less.