If you have read many of these posts over the years you will know that finding art and beauty while specifically looking toward the setting or rising sun is an ongoing challenge in places where heavy cloud cover is the norm in December. I hope you enjoy what I managed to wring out of Oregon this year regardless.
Read More2022 Solstice Vigil - Long Night Closer to Home
I know that tumult and change have been a recurrent theme in my Solstice Vigil essays for quite a number of years now, but as clichéd as it may sound, the Solstice once again finds my life looking rather different than it did when last the sun died and was reborn. As I alluded to in last year’s Solstice Vigil post, my dream job, which was one factor in our move out west, fell apart early in the new year. These days I’m working a forty hour a week job managing a retail shop, which is a far cry from the prestigious and creatively fulfilling job I was doing a year ago, though it does pay far better while being vastly less stressful. What has remained the same though is that my work life, and the move out west, where things are beautiful, but very challenging for me artistically, has left me stuck in a deep rut as a photographer. Keeping Winter Wind Photography online feels far more like an exercise in hope than a logical business choice, but hope is both important and in short supply these days, so online it will stay.
Sunset - Council Crest Park - Portland, OR
Work commitments this year meant that I couldn’t take much time off for the Solstice, working several hours on Solstice before sunset and a full evening shift the following day after a post-vigil nap. That in turn necessitated keeping my picture plans close-ish to home. One of my staff at work, who has lived in this area her whole life, immediately suggested Council Crest Park for my sunset photo.
My experience of the Winter Solstice is generally a solitary one, but Council Crest Park is rather crowded when I get there to shoot the last gasp of the dying year. Although the weather is turning nasty, heralding a bitter cold snap and oncoming storm, there are dozens of people up at the park atop one of the highest points in Portland. From children playing hopscotch, to people taking pictures of the sunset, playing instruments, and even one person with an easel and paints painting the setting sun.
I did consider including some of these folk in my sunset photo, but the truth is that I didn’t particularly feel like talking to people, and these days I don’t tend to feel comfortable including people in my photographs without their consent. I’m in a very social line of work right now, managing a retail shop in what has been the lead up to the gift-giving season, and my social battery gets pretty depleted on the regular.
Given how notoriously gray Oregon weather in the winter is (much like the Maine weather before it), I was delighted to have a lovely sunset to shoot this year. The Pacific Northwest can be painfully beautiful at times, and it bothers me that I’m still struggling to figure out how I want to both experience and capture that beauty in my photography. That said, I’m reasonably content with the photo I got for sunset, and that’s no bad thing.
Deep of the Night
This wasn’t my original idea for a Deep of the Night photo. I had strongly considered heading over to the shop I manage and shooting it lit up by its security lights at night, but I decided that wasn’t the right plan. My whole life I have struggled with investing too much of my identity in my job, whatever it was at that moment. That’s silly on multiple levels, not only because it’s generally not a healthy practice, but also because I’ve long considered my spiritual work to be my “real” job anyway. Nonetheless, being forced to walk away from my job as an automotive journalist was an enormous blow to my ego and my self worth, and I didn’t want to continue that pattern by implying that the thing giving succor in the dark of the Longest Night was the sex toy store where I burn forty hours of each week. That’s just icky, and there are honestly bigger concerns to contend with anyway.
Which brings us to the deep of the night photo I did choose to shoot. In this photo we have my Kimber Ultra Carry II, my We Knife Miscreant 3.0, and a Stop the Bleed kit, which includes a SAM Tourniquet, scissors, hemostatic gauze, and so on. In one photo, there are tools to make holes, and tools to plug them back up. It’s a lovely photo, but a dark subject matter for the Solstice.
Twenty Twenty-Two has been a particularly scary year for LGBTQ people, as the “groomer” rhetoric has exploded across the internet, and made the crossover into the IRL world in the form of bomb threats to hospitals, armed protests at drag shows, and anti-trans legislation in many US states. Then there was the mass shooting at Club Q, which would have been a lot worse than it was if not for the heroic actions of club patrons. But while “only” five of us died, it was still a horrifying attack on one of the few sacred places the queer community has.
I would love to live in a part of the world where gun violence wasn’t a reality of life, but I don’t, and none of those places tend to be open to queer immigrants with disabilities, so it’s unlikely my family will find its way out of the USA anytime soon.
Not everyone can own, use, or carry a weapon. That isn’t everyone’s path or comfort zone, and there are as many good reasons not to carry as there are to do so, arguably more in fact. But virtually everyone can learn to provide good first aid, including CPR and Stop the Bleed training. Humans are remarkably fragile bags-of-mostly-water, so having the training and tools to try and keep ourselves and the people around us alive in a crisis is a vital part of being part of a community and society.
As transphobia and homophobia, along with misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other all-too familiar forms of hate, not only in the USA, but elsewhere in the world, gain greater societal acceptance and in some cases legislative authority, we have to take steps to protect our communities and families. We all have different skill sets and tools with which to do so, but I’m certain it will take people who are willing to fight (in senses both metaphorical and perhaps literal too), those who are better suited to healing, and everything in between.
Sunrise - Cooper Mountain Nature Park
This wasn’t where I was planning to be for sunrise. But the sun rose this year onto a landscape and city holding its breath as a vicious winter storm bore down, not only on us, but on much of the nation. With that in mind, the location I’d chosen for my sunrise photo, Pittock Mansion, had closed for the next several days, which likely included keeping the gate leading to the site closed. Not wanting to chance arriving to find the grounds inaccessible, I instead headed out to Cooper Mountain Nature Park, where I hoped to have a good vantage from which to see the sun rise. For understandable reasons though, many viewpoints in my area that are well suited to see the rising sun, are intended for summer use. The winter sun rises along a very different axis, and I had to hike quite a distance in 6F wind chills to find a vantage where the Photographer’s Ephemeris indicated I should have a view of the rising sun.
It’s a gray morning, as many dawns have been in the seven years I’ve been doing this project. This year, as last though, I find myself a bit confused about the sunrise. See, shooting the sunrise over the ocean is easy. Check the time the sun rises, and if you’re looking out to the horizon, you know the sun has risen when that time has come and gone, even if it's so overcast there’s nothing to see but a bit of lightness to the gray gloom.
It’s a different picture out here. I haven’t gotten the hang of knowing when the sun not only rises, but also when it will become visible over the terrain. As a result, I stayed out for nearly an hour after sunrise, not entirely certain if the sun had risen into the clouds without me catching a glimpse, or if it had somehow not yet made it over the hills, though I strongly suspected the former.
Eventually the bitter cold wind drove me back to the car. Getting in an early morning hike to greet the return of the sun, even if it remained unseen, was no bad way to kick off the waxing year though. Twenty twenty-two was far from the most fulfilling Solstice I’ve had, on a spiritual, personal, or artistic level, but for me it still feels like something of a triumph. I’ve survived to reach another year, and even if I’m not quite where I want to be creatively, this is a tradition that matters to me, and it fed something in my soul to observe it.
Bonus - Mt Hood from Council Crest Park
This photo isn’t of the sunset, and thus doesn’t really fit the narrative of the vigil photo project, but I shot it facing a different direction from the setting sun. It’s nothing special, there are literally thousands of photos of Mt Hood from Council Crest Park, but it’s my favorite photo I’ve shot thus far of my local volcano, and I took it on the same evening as the first photo in this piece, so I wanted to share it.
2021 Solstice Vigil - Long Night Far Away
It’s been another tumultuous and challenging year, and I find myself going into this Solstice in a very different place than I was a year ago. For starters, this Solstice finds me not in the familiar surroundings of Southern Maine, but instead more than twenty five hundred miles to the west, in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The decision to move across the country to a place where we knew almost no one was a difficult one, and we are still very much adapting to our new surroundings, a process made far more difficult by COVID’s unrelenting presence in all our lives.
Sunset - Sunset - Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach - Cannon Beach, Oregon
There was never any question in my mind that I wanted my Solstice vigil to begin at the ocean. The sea has been such a constant in my photography work and my spiritual life for nearly a decade, it just made sense that I would watch the last of the year’s light disappear into the Pacific Ocean. But I’m not oblivious to the fact that this is the Pacific Northwest in December, and like New England this time of year, seeing the sun is something of a rare treat rather than a guarantee.
If you could see the sun in this photo, it would be dipping below the horizon just to the right of the basalt bulk of Haystack Rock, right about where the lights of a fishing boat can just barely be seen. I know that the last thing the world needs is yet another picture of this particular sea stack, one of the largest on earth, and one that is extensively photographed. But being there for me is a perfect blending of the familiar and the new. The beach and ocean are a comfortably routine subject for me, but the massive volcanic remnant serves as a stark reminder that this is neither the beach nor ocean that I’m used to. As the gray sky dims and the long night begins, I trudge back to the car through a droning rain that will follow me on the ninety minute mountain drive back to the valley where we’re making our new home.
Deep of the Night - Beaverton, Oregon
Last year’s Solstice vigil opened at our beloved rental home in Dayton, Maine. That house was everything we look for in a home, and especially in the days before there was a COVID vaccine, it was a treasured refuge from a world made newly-dangerous thanks to the respiratory pandemic blazing across the globe.
We don’t live in a house out in the country here in Oregon, but instead in an apartment complex on the edges of Portland’s suburban sprawl. It is a fine landing point for people who moved across a continent, but it isn’t a good fit for who we are and where we want to be. There are many conveniences to living in suburbia, but it’s also loud (both physically and energetically), and it never gets truly dark here. There’s a… garishness to this place that is at once seductive and counter-productive for the lives we want to lead, and people we want to be. The lurid glow of the hot tub and pool feel like a good representation of that dichotomy. We take advantage of the hot tub at least three or four days a week, but it nonetheless feels like a wasteful and gaudy distraction.
Sunrise - Jonsrud Viewpoint - Sandy, Oregon
Beyond the clouds on the horizon, about thirty five miles away, is Mount Hood, an active volcano that is a constant presence on a clear day, even from where we live an hour west of where I chose to greet the dawn. But if you can only appreciate the beauty of this part of the world on a clear day, you will quickly find yourself miserable here.
I chose the Jonsrud Viewpoint for the end of my long night vigil because I knew even if Hood didn’t make an appearance, I would still have the Sandy River and the expansive forest spread out before me as I greeted the dawn. And even without Mount Hood, nature and the fates still had a treat for me.
Rain was a constant companion through this long night, it is the Pacific Northwest after all, and the rain started almost as soon as my watch informed me that the sun had set at Cannon Beach. By the time I arrived at the Jonsrud Viewpoint, the rain had picked up enough that I had to crank up the volume on the radio to overcome the sound of it hammering on the glass roof of my borrowed Tesla.
Dressed in rain gear and using weather sealed lenses on my cameras, I shot a number of photos of the mist shrouded river valley through the rain as the sky lightened. Eventually, wet and resigned, I loaded my gear back into the trunk of the car and prepared for the hour’s drive home. But standing with the driver’s door open, I decided I owed it to myself to give the sky just another couple of minutes. I could see a crack in the clouds in the distance and the rain had begun to slack a bit.
Two minutes later, I was hauling my gear back out of the trunk as I prepared to give the sky one more chance. My optimism and persistence was rewarded when the sun briefly broke through the clouds, giving me the chance to take a number of photos of the first light of the waxing year. Some of those photos are honestly stunning, but it was this one that I felt was the best fit for this year’s Solstice essay project.
We expect to stay here in Oregon for the foreseeable future, though now more than ever that future is unknowable. My job, which was one of the factors in our move, feels very uncertain, and the world we live in grows more unstable every day in a multitude of ways, from the environmental to the political. And of course, COVID variants continue to disrupt the best laid plans and cast a pall over everything we all try to do.
I have never gone into the long night so unsure of what the waxing year will bring, but whatever the future holds, I’m going to try to go into it with patience and the hope for those glimpses of the sun, along with the surety that even when the light is hidden, it still burns somewhere beyond the horizon.
Note - where images were HDR the Exif information for the 0+/- image was provided
2020 Solstice Vigil: The Longest Night of the Longest Year
Figuring out what to photograph for my solstice vigil in 2020 proved more challenging than in years past. I had big plans for the year 2020, including a weekly Picture Tells a Story post, which fell by the wayside as the pervasive anxiety and isolation of the pandemic set in. For most of us in the United States fortunate enough to have them, the vast majority of 2020 has been experienced through the lens of our homes, so my husband suggested that this year my vigil be entirely centered around our rented house in southern Maine.
Read More2019's Long Night - Solstice in Three Photos
It occurs to me as I sit down to write up my 2019 Long Night journey, that I haven’t written anything substantive in over ten months, not since I wrote my mom’s eulogy. For that matter, I also have done little scenic or landscape photography in that same time. The idea of taking those kinds of photos without being able to share them with mom has simply been too painful.
In a year that has, for many reasons, including losing my mother, felt like a year-long slog through an unending Long Night, I set out into my Solstice vigil low on sleep and high on anxiety, but determined to honor the turning of the year.
Sunset
Over a year since moving away from Old Orchard Beach, it’s on that familiar stretch of sand that I find myself saying goodbye to the waning sun. The popular resort town becomes a shadow of its summer-self by this time of year. The amusement park looms skeletal over the pier area, where all but a few businesses are shuttered. In the winter, it’s occasionally possible to stand on the beach and not see another soul.
I have the beach to myself on this grey, chill, solstice eve. Just when I had resigned myself to relying on my watch to tell me when the sun officially set though, a brief break in the clouds graces me with a last glimpse of light before the Long Night sets its teeth into the world.
Sony A7iii w/Tamron 17-28mm f2.8 @21mm
ISO 2500 1/125 f7.1
Processed in Capture One
Deep of the Night
In a similar vein to my 2018 deep of the night photo, my 2019 clever conceptual photo plan proves untenable. This year I go through with executing the photos, at no small inconvenience and discomfort, but the results are dismal.
However, I find myself oddly relieved. The idea that failed was a revisit of a successful mid vigil shot from a few years ago, with only minor variation. Moreover, it took (kept?) my solstice journey in an emotionally dark place. As much as it makes sense, it’s not the energy I want to carry into the waxing year.
Looking for something more joyous and whimsical, I bundle up and trudge down the road. In the bitter cold and inky darkness, with a silly grin on my face, I spend some time getting a photo that my husband has been asking for for weeks. Our neighbors about a half mile away have decked one of their dump trucks in lights, with Santa in the cab behind the iced over windows. It’s just so ridiculous and fun, a perfect bit of levity in the depths of the Long Night.
Sony A7iii w/Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 @75mm
ISO 160 3.2 seconds f8
Processed in Capture One
Sunrise
For the dawn of the waxing year, I find myself at a spot I’ve considered each year for sunrise at the end of my solstice vigil, but never actually visited. I’m relieved at how easy it is to get to, and the view down the Saco River is beautiful as the approaching sun begins setting the scattered clouds ablaze. My spot is perfectly positioned for the rising sun, something that is more difficult to find on the Maine coast than one might imagine.
I’m in position a solid half hour before the sun is scheduled to break the horizon, and shoot dozens of photos as the dawn paints the sky in blues, purples, and finally, yellows as the day begins to break. After each shot, I tuck my hands quickly into my pockets, thawing them with the rechargeable electric hand-warmer I have stashed there.
When the sun is well and truly hung in the sky, and the most visually exciting elements of sunrise have passed, I turn to head back. A local, in his tennis-ball yellow Jeep (a color GM calls “Shock”) has stopped behind me to watch the sunrise, and generously offers me a ride back to the lot where I’ve parked. For the first time in three years, solstice dawn has brought color and a view of the sun, rather than simply a brightening of a cloud-shrouded sky. That, plus the kindness of a passing stranger, has me feeling lighter and easier than when I set out into the Long Night just over fifteen hours earlier.
Sony A7iii w/Tamron 17-28mm 2.8 @20mm
ISO 100 1/160 f8
Processed in Capture One