"Winter Solstice 2013" - a reading (on YouTube)
We open our eyes to a pale reflection in pink and orange. A
long, gray wall of fog looms at the horizon like Hadrian's last defense. As the
fog emerges from the soft gray light of dawn, we feel like distant lanterns,
tiny candles floating aimlessly across the water.
A gray stillness settles outside as though the world has
paused for breath. Through a misty haze, the daylight silvers as the morning
ages. A faded white sun hangs motionless against the brushed platinum sky, a
sun-bleached sun melting to moonrise by midafternoon.
As autumn deepens into winter, dappled sunlight brushes like
mist against the screen until the fog melts into rain, washing the shadow from our
minds. Droplets of air condense and run down its surface, filling the spaces in
between like a memory of unfallen tears.
Fiery tendrils of the setting sun send steam drifting across
the water and smoke swirling among the trees as fog coalesces from twilight.
The golden fog burns along the horizon like the beacon of the Hermit's lantern
guiding our way forward through another umbrageous day. Come evening spheres of
silver, pink and gold hang below the streetlamps and house lights, iridescent
ornaments in a nighttime world of fog.
Day by day, our ink fades a little further from the page
until, one morning, nothing remains of each line of our lives but the shadow of
a memory. This night, we light the sacred candles. In darkness we were born of
fire. Small souls, at midwinter we return to ash, awaiting Brigid’s breath at Imbolc
to be reborn. Another cycle lays behind us, craggy and arthritic yet complete,
even as the next one beckons, her slender finger as pale and unblemished as the
promise of the coming spring.
© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III
All of the different scenes of fog we’ve seen at the house. One year, we were completely fogged in on the solstice. Another year, we were driving around and the sun looked very much like the moon behind a high, completely uniform sheet of bronze-ish cloud that went from horizon to horizon, like nothing I’ve seen before or since. The nighttime fog glowing around the neighborhood lights seemed apt for that other holiday that falls this time of year. The final paragraph mirrored the opening from the Imbolc message this year. Once again, we’ve come full circle and get ready to start again.
ReplyDeleteUmbrageous in this context means affording shade (rather than easily offended). Hadrian’s last defense refers to Hadrian’s Wall near the English/Scottish border meant to keep the Picts (and others) at bay. The Hermit refers to the tarot card of the same name, a seeker of truth in darkness.
For the YouTube reading, I asked Karen if she would create one illustration for each paragraph to add some changing scenery to the video. She graciously obliged. I hope you check out her wonderful work at the link in the message.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteFor this Solstice message I did five sketches. You can see the rest of them on Youtube, Edward's reading (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEWqRd4OZ6Q&feature=youtu.be) or my Flickr site (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rocks_in_her_head/sets/72157637266883994/).
The five sketches cover the whole essay. Each one was meant to capture one aspect in a paragraph.
The first was a wall of fog. The background was a sunset, lots of color blended to be like clouds. The gray fog between you and the horizon as if illuminated by the sun, crowning the edge of the fog and making it glow.
The second images is reminiscent of two striking skies we've seen. One a platinum bronze with a faded sun, the likes of which we haven't seen since, and the second a sun that reflected its light off the Gulf of Mexico to the underside of the clouds. Both very memorable.
The third image took the longest to do. When a screen gets rain, or fog, water gets trapped in the individual screen cells. Each one is an inverted reflection of the world beyond the screen. To get this I started in the iDraw app and created a grid to be the screen. I exported that into ProCreate, then gave the layers function a workout. The background was just a blend of colors, green and gray. Then I created one cell in the screen inverted from the background. Then copy, paste… over and over and over again… each time creating a new layer. Procreate has a layer limit so I'd merge the layers, move them about, copy, past move, and merge again until the whole screen was covered Then I had to go back in and erase cells so the patterns of drops didn't repeat itself. It took several nights of work. But I liked the way it came out.
The fourth image was trying to capture the glow beneath the street lamps. Again I created the lamps in iDraw, then moved them to Procreate to create the glow and fog. The lamp is repeated, resized and repeated again to give the illusion of perspective. Then the glow, in both front of and behind the lamps, layer-wise, gave them the glow.
The last image is an interpretation of a photo I took for another Celtic Holiday essay. The candles were reflected in water. I first drew one candle, them copied it two more times. Then I added some extra detail to each candle so they would be unique. Once that was done I copied all three candles and inverted them, then used a smudge tool to ripple the "reflection". I added a little color to represent a shelf that the candles were sitting on and it was done.
I didn't do them all in the order presented, but jumped back and forth between them as I finished them. Then brought them into photoshop to make them all the same size.
I hope you enjoy.