Winter solstice recognized
A human movement
At first I was pleased to see this post on the internet; a tribute to nature’s annual holidays. I have shifted my annual celebrations to the most Yin day of the year … cool!
The last line which acknowledges the winter solstice as a decolonial act strikes me as disrespectful to Mother Nature however. True, it is not so much about mother nature as about those who acknowledge her darkest day. And right there is the problem: humans seem inable to take themselves out of the main focus even for a cosmic holiday.
As clarified by Michael Tsang in a post1 a decolonial act is not so much a political one as an epistemological one “ delinking ourselves from the structure of knowledge imposed by the West and reconstituting our ways of thinking, speaking, and living. “
I myself have urged such a view at times even attempting reconstitution as when walking around town on the solstice I responded ‘happy winter solstice” to the many “merry christmas”s I received.
Mother Nature joined in the conversation in her native tongue - our first winter storm on that day - the first day of winter. How fitting.
*I could not capture a good web address for this, but for pursuers of interesting epistomological movements this was a post under Newcastle University’s School of Modern Language: M Tsang, ‘Decolonising Modern Language and Cultures: Decolonial? Post colonial? what does it mean to ‘decolonise ourselves’?