(Author’s note: This blog was inadvertently published on December 18th. D’oh! I am publishing it again with more content.)
Happy Solar New Year! We’ve made it around the sun one more time, dodging comets, rouge asteroids and unfriendly aliens. Yosemite hasn’t blown up and California is still attached. So far, so good.
Celebrating the Solstice dates back forever, way beyond recorded history. Back to the Neolithic Age and probably before as far back as the Paleolithic.
We celebrate by dancing with fire, man’s best friend and fiercest element. When we learned to use fire about 1.5 million years ago, we started cooking our food and our Homo erectus brains grew.
We evolved. After days of hunting, gathering and tending to our collective needs we gathered around the fire for warmth and companionship. Languages developed. We became story tellers.
Gather around your solstice fire, tell stories and celebrate the dawn of another year.