On the Solstice

Christmas letter, December 21, 2012

     Here we are, the shortest day, the longest night, the pivot point between diurnal waxing and waning.  There's some wonderful connection between Christ's birth in four days, near the end of a string of the 10 longest nights of the year, and the fact that the new solar year has already begun, though imperceptibly to all but those who study minute detail.

    He is coming, it won't be long now.  Mary's water will break, the lowly stable will be found for shelter, the shepherds will get astounding news from angels they've never seen before and, with the wisdom of innocents, follow the angels' directions to the stable's doorway.  What a blessing they will be to Mary and Joseph, confirmation of a divine dream arriving through the bodies and hopes of peasants.  Can you imagine?

    I am awake early on this shortest day, wanting to be fully present for every moment of it.  It is not quiet:  the wind machines have been running for three nights, as have the men who tend them, keeping watch over the orange, lemon and mandarin crops.  A friend who farms at the foothills' edge called two nights ago remembering the 1990 Freeze, an event that pulled me here just as certainly as the star pulled the wise men.  This year won't be that:  rain is forecast for the weekend.  But we remember - everyone over 25, anyway.

     The friend also paid me a compliment.  I'd been talking about not having the qualities required for an executive director position, and she said "Oh, no, you're a dreamer."  She'd called initially to congratulate me on the triumph we've had in Lindsay replacing intransigent city council members and electing this city's first Latina mayor, which I'd announced in my column in this Wednesday's paper (see "The Promise to Listen," below.)  "Lindsay's always been this way - you can't change it" was the town's mantra I'd heard since coming down from Davis to investigate the impacts of the 1990 Freeze.  But I joined up with some other dreamers 2 years ago, and this is where it led.  For the past year my columns have been posted to a blog site sponsored by the paper, and anyone interested can read this past year's efforts at trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com.

     A phrase from a sentence I wrote 20 years ago arrived this morning as I woke.  The sentence was summing up the work of Paul Taylor, my Berkeley mentor, whose work on farmworkers and water law, particularly the federal acreage limitation and residency provisions intended to promote a system of small-scale resident family farms in the arid west, is the set of rails I rode to become a resident of Tulare County, this sometimes unholy Holy Land.  I wrote:  "Paul was a keeper of the dream that dreamed Jefferson:  human equality maintained through democracy, democracy maintainable only so long as the resources of the country are equally distributed."  When I spoke that sentence at a conference in Sacramento, the phrase "the dream that dreamed Jefferson" turned on the lights for Jeff Lustig, one of the conference's convenors who'd already given a few years to Paul's subject but had never seen the source.  It turned on the lights for me this morning about why I'm here, after spending yesterday thinking I'd put all my eggs in this basket without first checking for holes.

     The sky has lightened, the sun's almost up.  It's a new day in Lindsay, as it is everywhere, every day.  Tomorrow the days will begin waxing, though we won't be able to discern the change for weeks and will simply have to take it on faith that Copernicus was right about the earth turning on its axis.  We'll have to take it on faith that we're here for a reason, like Mary and Joseph trudging toward Bethlehem, supposedly to be counted, but in fact bringing Light into a dark world.  Trudge on, fellow dreamers:  follow that star.

     With all my love and hope for a new year,  Trudy