Large Fierce Mammal

The Last White Christmas by Vablo (2013). Click the title of the picture to read its uplifting tale.

As I write to you this evening Goode Reader, it is to the clamorous accompaniment of the Wild Hunt shredding the very tops of the Hemlocks. Most appropriately timed, for 23:27 Atlantic Time this Midwinter Night marks the moment of our embarkation on yet another pilgrimage upon the steep and slippery slope leading up to sweet, sweet Spring.

Unveiling my all seeing eye and gazing back across the expanse we’ve just travelled to get here, it has not escaped my notice that beyond minor changes in cast, nothing of substance has changed. As always, and no matter the label, the scapegoat, or the angular velocity of the narrative, everyone who has ever been born can still expect to be the villain in someone’s story, and human beings as a species are still the single biggest contributor to putting the brakes on having nice things.

Human societies have supplanted Community and Cooperation with a driving need to control their fellows for the “benefit” of all creatures, thus to “save” the Earth from the folly of present humans for the “benefit”, even “salvation” of future humans. More enlightened ones who look and speak exactly like whoever’s talking.

The Natural drive to Thrive has gone bipolar amid the throng, leaving nothing but winning and losing, along with a woeful ignorance of the role played by context in the True definition of each.

On this Long Winter’s Night, I would caution against spending too much time in the clutching of pearls and craning of necks to check what interval remains before midnight on the Doomsday Clock. I myself have long since lost interest in that timepiece as holding meaning beyond the metaphorical. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, so what’s that say about it?

Whatever happens now, then, or never, Nature will fill whatever niche we outgrow, or fail in our Sacred obligation to fulfill, without missing a tick in the inexorable advance of the hands on Her own clock. For the time they measure out will appear at once fleeting and vast according to point of view, and notwithstanding that All will come to be accomplished within their sweep.

And don’t forget, all deaths matter.

In those regions that observe it, Krampusnacht has passed, but let that not stay us from concluding tonight’s ever so merry proceedings with this cautionary carol from the prolific Hildegard von Blingin’, prolific purveyor of, “Bardcore for the discerning clergyman, noble, or muck-gathering peasant.”