The Sun Stands Still: Grounding in the Natural World

Thank you for reading The Liminal! As we approach the holidays, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to all subscribers, especially paid subscribers. I very much appreciate your support. Thank you! Please “heart” and share this and other posts you enjoy. It really does help! Go raibh míle, míle maith agat!

An grianstad an gheimhridhion—the winter solstice (Original artwork by author, 1985).

---

“The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti

---

Grounded in Place

One of my delights in the Irish language is how observational it is; Irish literally “grounds” us in the natural world. Irish place names, for example, refer to geographic features. This sense of place is completely lost in the English names, which are not translations but attempts to phonetically replicate the sounds of Irish words. “Belfast,” for example, is Béal Feirste, the "Mouth of the Farset," a river whose name in Irish, feirste, refers to a sandbar or tidal ford. Before the river was redirected, this sandbar actually existed. Many placenames in Ireland begin with “Bally,” for example, Ballyferriter, from “baile,” the Irish for home or town (see How Big is Your Home?).

Nearly ten thousand places with a connection to “home”… (Graphic by Dónal Casey)

---

“Kil/Kill, ” as found in Kilkenny, Kilmainham, Killarney and other places, comes from either “coill” meaning “wood” or “cill” meaning “church.” Kildare is derived from the old Irish Cill Dara, meaning 'church of the oak,' which commemorates St. Brigid and her abby, supposedly based there. Oaks were sacred trees in indigenous Irish culture and St. Brigid was said to be fostered by a druid. “Kildare” then, through “church” and “oak,” links her to both pre-Christian and Christian tradtions in Ireland. If you find these connections interesting, there’s a glossary of common words in Irish placenames and a chart here. Once you can recognize the roots as Gaeilge, it becomes even more fun traveling around Éire (literally traveling across the body of the goddess Ériu) where, sleuthlike, you can decode Anglicized placenames.

---

Observing Nature

Irish grounds us in the natural world in numerous other ways. The word for “out” or “outside,” amach, for example, comes from an Irish word for field, mach. As Manchán Magan points out in Thirty-Two Words for Field, this notion—that each time you step out the door, you’re going to a field—is “a lovely thing.” Even relational directions are based on the natural world in Irish. In English, we say “clockwise,” giving direction in relation to a mechanical device that could be located anywhere in the world. Before the invention of clocks—which were based on sundials—English also used the word “sunwise” or some form of the Irish word “deiseal” for “clockwise.” So even if borrowed from Irish, there was once in English too a connection of time to the sun: to the actual, physical world, the sky and the land. Deiseal, which means in Irish a “righthand direction” or “the direction of the sun,” is still used today. It comes from Old Irish, dess (“right, south”) and sel (“turn”). For this to have any accuracy, you need to be in the Northern hemisphere and actually facing the sun.

---

“The notion of the principle location that one went out to was a field is a lovely thing.”— Manchán Magan

---

Similar to directionality in relation to the sun, the word for “solstice” in Irish, grianstad, is also based on actual observation. Grian in Irish means “sun” and stad means “stop, halt, cease, or stay.” So “solstice” as Gaeilge is literally when the sun stops. If you actually watch the movement of the sun, this is what seems to happen:

“The Sun's westerly motion never ceases as Earth is continually in rotation. However, the Sun's motion in declination (i.e. vertically) comes to a stop, before reversing, at the moment of solstice. In that sense, solstice means "sun-standing" (Wikipedia).

Again, all this is based on being in a particular time and place and paying attention to what’s happening in the sky. In the northern hemisphere, we are now approaching grianstad an gheimhridh, the winter “sun-stopping.” If you look up the etymology, the English word has the same meaning: from Old French and ultimately Latin, sol, “sun” plus stit, meaning stopped or stationary. But as I often find, in English this meaning is hiding. You have to go digging for it. The reminder in the actual words (not their etymology) that we are living in relation to the natural world, is lost.

---

“The word solstice is derived from the Latin sol ("sun") and sistere ("to stand still"), because at the solstices, the Sun's declination appears to "stand still"; that is, the seasonal movement of the Sun's daily path (as seen from Earth) pauses at a northern or southern limit before reversing direction.” —Wikipedia

---

Why does this matter?

Before learning Irish, I knew that the solstice in winter is the shortest day of the year and in summer, the longest. But I had never thought about how, for this to occur, the sun “stops,” resting in the same place. It’s a calendar date—December 21st—so I thought of it as one day. I was applying a human concept of mechanical clocks and calandars onto a natural event. In fact the sun “stops” for three days; if you are in a mid-northern latitude, the “sun-stopping” (the sun in the same position along the horizon) lasts for two to three weeks.

Learning all this, I can see why earlier humans would have been anxious about the sun’s disappearance and celebrated its return. This invites in for me an even deeper appreciation for ancient sites such as Stonehenge and Newgrange. I have visited Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange) numerous times over the years (though not yet won the lottery to be there on the winter solstice!). It is a powerful and moving experience to stand inside this ancient sanctum built by humans more than five thousand years ago (older than the pyramids in Egypt). Only at the winter solstice, the darket time of the year, the entire inner chamber is illuminated through a small portal above the door, perfectly aligned with the sun.

Before clocks, there were sundials; before sundials, early humans simply watched the sun. Today, atomic clocks measure time by monitoring the resonant frequency of atoms—a part of nature too small for us to even see. We are no longer watching the sun—waiting for the sliver of light to enter a sacred chamber, as at Newgrange, or noticing when she’s standing still. Our lives have become smaller and, at once, too big: we know what’s happening on the other side of the world almost immediately but don’t always know what’s going on inside our own skins, or on our own horizions. One day races into another—an express train barrelling down the tracks.

When I was in my twenties travelling around Ireland, I happened across a book on the philosophy of hitchhiking. Sadly I lost it on my travels before finishing it. But a basic concept stayed with me: when hitchhiking, we enter local time—the time of actual people living their lives in that specific place. I got to experience that: One time a school bus driver gave me a lift (with a bus full of children); another time, it was someone delivering milk, with the bottles rattling behind us. This was rural Ireland, on the Dingle penninsula. I am not sure it would happen today. It gave me that sense, which hitching often did, of the sun stopping: a sacred time, where I could pause long enough to observe and pay attention. One time I got stuck for hours on the Conor Pass, one of the highest mountain passes in Ireland. I walked the lonely roads and took in the air and mountains in a way that I would otherwise have missed if traveling any other way. And I did get to Dingle in the end, before night fall.

The short days invite in a time of rest and reflection; a time to dive into the well; a dreaming time. In our busy and driven world, we can forget to pause and take a break. We can forget to observe, and wonder at the world. It is inspiring for me that even the sun—so full of exuberance and life-giving energy—takes a “rest” in winter, and slumbers not just for one day, but three. Surely if the sun takes a good rest, so can we. I am grateful to the Irish language for bringing all this to my attention through the power of observation.

Slán go fóill for now and thanks, as always, for coming along for the ride,

Dian, i mBaile Atha Cliath (in Dublin)

---

Grianstad an gheimhridh sona duit! (Happy winter solstice to you!)