Finding Time

It's about half past eight in the morning on the shortest day of the year 2001, and I am musing about time, destiny and achievement. Through the window I scan the small wood, across a road busy with the local school-run, waiting for the rising sun to enliven the trunk of an old oak, and turn its neighbouring yew tree from black to green. Because the house is higher than the road I have the impression of looking into a wild wood, a mostly primeval scene, which occupies all of the window space. Indeed, the twenty or so acres of trees is called ‘the wild gardens’, and is part of a park designed by public spirited Victorian worthies to incorporate a small intractable wetland of alder carr that was of no use to the Marquis of Bute’s agents for building middle class dwellings. I am thinking that on this day of the winter solstice, through thousands of millennia, many an anxious glance was cast skywards, particularly towards the east when, like today, the murk looks especially thick and grey. The particular view I am waiting for, of a veteran tree at sunrise, may not materialise at all, but this day really does mark the physical turning of the year. Significantly, it is another a notch in my lifetime, but also symbolic reminder that our personal spiritual universes are profoundly seasonal. To generate new cultural thrusts I think we need autumn and winter as symbols of the great resurrections of spring and summer, particularly when new explorations of nature enlarge the human spirit, and release fresh thoughts about human destiny. In this sense we are all time-travellers, who communicate, and form communities with the aid of symbols, such as this shortest day of the year. Markers, like my oak tree illuminated at the winter solstice, are important in organizing social life, and belong to a category of forms and rituals that serve the roles, rules, and regulations, which sustain the established social order. Other symbols permit the emergence of subgroups, each sharing common convictions and organizing themselves in ways that differ from the larger social group - as in cults, millennial movements, elite regiments, counter-cultures, monastic orders, and so on. Most of these examples, particularly the religious movements, incorporate a sense of group destiny beyond the limits of lifespan and lifetime ambitions for an individual's ‘economic improvement’. The bare twigs that criss-cross my window present a symbolic surface with innumerable avenues into science, anthropology and religion.