A solstice approaches, unnoticed

In recent months, catastrophic weather events have dominated headlines as rarely before — earthquakes and tsunami in Asia; volcanic cloud in Europe; massive ice melts at the poles; tornadoes, floods, and fires in America. “Records are not just broken,” an atmospheric scientist said last week, “they are smashed.” Without getting into questions of causality, and without anthropomorphizing nature, we can still take these events as nature’s cri de coeur — as the degraded environment’s grabbing of human lapels to say, “Pay attention!”

To our ancestors in the deep past, that attention to nature was, well, natural. They made the evolutionary leap into human consciousness through close observation, among other things, of what heavenly bodies do in the sky. In a cosmos over which they had no control, paying attention to patterns of heat and cold, light and dark, rain and drought was a matter of survival. The invention of agriculture depended on awareness of seasons, so that times of planting and harvesting, herding and grazing, could be depended upon. Movements of the sun and moon were seen to have both influences on, and counterparts in, individual human experience — from mood swings to menstruation to aging. Astrology opened into astronomy, calculation into mathematics, scrutiny into science. Definitions of the calendar were essential to culture. The solstice was a marker of all this.