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 More2021 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 MoreFuji X-T1 w/Rokinon 21mm f1.4
ISO 200 1/350 f/11
Processed in Capture One 10 & Photoshop
The Dawn of 2017
The sun at last has set on 2016, and I'm glad to see it go. It was a year that saw a seemingly endless cavalcade of personal, cultural, humanitarian, and political horrors. From my mother's cancer battle, to my father-in-law's suicide, to the protracted shit-show of the US election, and so many other individual and collective struggles, the last twelve months have been simply brutal.
Fuji X-T1 w/Olympus OM 85mm f2
ISO 200 1/500 f5.6
Processed in Capture One 10 & Photoshop
And although it is tough to summon up much optimism for the coming year, the dawn of 2017 nevertheless found me watching for the first light of a new year, having returned Camp Ellis, where I shot my Solstice vigil photos. There were other places I might have gone, but after my dispiriting Solstice dawn, I wanted to try again for a joyous sunrise, rather than the miserable one that ended the Long Night.
There are two reasons why I shoot the sunrise of January 1st every year, and they are both so vitally important to me:
The first is that shooting the sunrise is itself a profound act of hope. Against a black sky, it is difficult to know what a sunrise will look like. Even with weather radar and satellite maps, the sunrise is something of a mystery until it happens. When I am packing up my gear and loading everything into the car, I am committing to a course of action based solely on the hope that the sunrise will be worth the effort. And if there is one thing above all else that I have to hold close to my heart going into the new year, it is hope.
Fuji X-T1 w/Rokinon 21mm f1.4
ISO 200 1/450 f/11
Processed in Capture One 10 & Photoshop
The second reason is intimately linked to the first. It may not be possible to live without hope, but it is equally true that it isn't possible to succeed without making the best of the hand that the Fates deal us. I made a commitment both to shoot the sunrise of the new year, and to share that sunrise with all of you. With that as a given, I have no choice but to make sure the results are worth being seen. That puts me under no small amount of pressure, but I need to be able to use that pressure to make myself and my art better.
Fuji X-T1 w/Rokinon 21mm f1.4
ISO 200 1/950 f/5.6
Processed in Capture One 10 & Photoshop
In the divination system of the magical/mystery tradition I belong to, we talk about the Left Hand, in which we hold close the things that we use to shield ourselves from an often harsh world, while in our Right Hand we hold that which we put out into that world. Making an effort to be mindful of what I'm holding close to heart and what I'm putting out into the world is a perspective I find particularly useful to my mental and emotional well-being.
Fuji X-T1 w/Konica AR 135mm f3.2
ISO 200 1/1250 f8
Processed in Capture One 10 & Photoshop
And so as the sun rose on the first dawn of 2017, I held hope in my left hand and hard work in my right.
I suspect that we all will need an abundance of both before the last sun sets on the coming year.