Thursday, December 21
What is it, a milestone? It's an arbitrary location, it tells you where you are, relatively. A solstice is a kind of milestone, except we don't know what it's relative to. We can't expect the earth to go on circling the sun forever, and we can't know exactly when the first solstice occurred. The endpoints are unclear. At least geographical milestones pretend to have definite positions along a path. Celestial milestones are, however, not arbitrary. They can be precisely measured and described as points in space where certain relationships shift. After a specific moment today, the sun will begin to illuminate the Northern hemisphere of the earth for longer periods. This has a definite effect. For many complicated reasons, our culture doesn't choose to define a year's beginning as ...