Lines composed on the Winter Solstice 1998, two days after the House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment against President Clinton.
When I stepped out of the front door of my office building this afternoon, the sun was setting. I had worked from sunup until sundown, not a difficult task on the shortest day of the year.
The building is a two story, c.1880’s, wood frame house. It’s impossible to tell how many people, how many members of how many families strolled out of that doorway in the century-plus years of its life. I am just another.
As I walked out and the door closed behind me and I saw the bright orange sun slipping behind the tall pines a quarter mile away on the other side of the San Sebastian River, I paused. This was as far south as the sun would travel. I paused, placed my heels against the baseboard of the door, and marked the sun-set-spot with one of the posts on the porch. This way, I could measure the sun’s march back north, as the days grow longer.
I found solace in the solstice today. Something I could count on, as I do with many, many things in my life. There are many, many things I can not count on, have no control over, could never consider constant. But I can always count on the sun, going south until this day in December, then slowly, consistently, with steady constant pace, moving back northerly for the next six months.
In many ways, this is the comfort I have felt about the United States Constitution in recent days. Members of Congress have been and continue to be faced with grave tasks, which no living person can provide counsel based on experience. They turn to peers and party and polls to assist them. Some may turn to conscience. They have made and will continue to make decisions that may or may not be correct. But one thing is certain. When it is all over the Constitution will still be standing.
The men and the women who make up the current cast, in all roles, are temporary, but the Constitution is constant. That is why sinking too much faith in any leader is chancy, but faith in the Constitution is solid.
Often we search for absolutes, values that are unwavering, about which there can be no debate. This is not easy, and yet it truly is not hard to know those things that we all hold dear. They are the ties that bind all of our hearts together. They may be hard to define, but we know them when we see them. Just as I knew the sun had reached the end of its semi-annual southerly journey.
These days surrounding the solstice are rich with opportunities to rediscover absolutes. Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, and Kwanzaa all celebrate constant values that are not far afield from each other, that have more commonality than contrast.
As the sun begins its march back north, and I check its progress at the conclusion of each day as I step from my office, I will use it as a reminder to check those things within myself that are to be constant: my responsibility to my wife and my son and my daughter; my commitment to those to which I have given my word, whether implicit or explicit; my service to my community which is only as good as its worst citizen; and promises made to myself rooted in dreams I once had and never want to lose.
In these changing times, when uncertainty is certain, my new solar year wish is that you be blessed with the comfort of the constants of our world, and find strength for your soul, strength that you can share, with that which you know to be the unchanging connection my soul has with yours and both of ours with all others.