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.