Tuesday, June 20, 2006

The long and the short of it.

Some primal fibre someplace in my being is vibrating in harmonic sympathy with the turn of the seasons. As I sit here I imagine that some distant Celtic ancestor could not possibly imagine that a future descendant of theirs would not be painted blue and engaged in sacred ritual on this day. Timed by the movement of a shadow cast by a great stone monolith torches are lit and howling painted deadlocked tribe call out to natural forces as real to them as the air they breath.
So should you feel the sudden urge to run around in a forest it is probably a similar ancestral memory stirring, happy Solstice.
(Send photos)

6 comments:

Erin said...

But solstice is tomorrow, not today.

And wode doesn't sound like a good alternative to clothing!

that girl said...

dude, go for the wode! go for the wode!

(and post pictures)

unique_stephen said...

Erin – Typical. You north Americans get everything all arse about. Not only do you have the longest day on what should be the shortest, but you even get the day wrong!! Let alone that you have Christmas in winter. For goodness sake girl, everybody knows that Christmas is a summer affair - turkey on the beach, sunburn, and sand in your food. What is this fascination with snow covered pine trees?? :-)

I'm all for the woad - the modern version is nude twister with blue lube.

I have since been informed that the Celts didn't really celebrate the equinoxes and the solstices, rather they celebrated Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnassadh, which were in-between the calendar ordinals.

Erin said...

*laugh*

Crazy people whose toilets swirl the wrong way. That's what you are!
See here - we invented (solstice, that is), just like everything else of great import in the world.

Oh, wait, lots of cultures had our technology before we did... calendars, the wheel, calculus... shit.

unique_stephen said...

A note on toilets.
Our toilets don't swirl. North American style toilets are all full of water which has several disadvantages: you have to watch your turds doing circle work when you flush, you have to be careful not to touch the water (or a nasty floater) when you wipe because it is close to your hand and lastly, you don't know if it's going to be a 1 or a 2 ahead of time so you pre-commit a bowl full of water. Our loos have much less water in the bottom and are thinner - once you've done you business you can half or full flush it and the water rushes down from the cistern. So it doesn’t swirl - it just rushed down in a big slosh and is gone.

Erin said...

Huh. Interesting. I have a low water toilet (~1gal) but it still swirls.