Once More Around

I'm not sure if the image here is sunrise or sunset. If I got curious enough, I could look at the metadata, the information saved along with the image by the camera when the photo was taken. But it's not important. Because this image is just a fraction of a second caught by the sensor in my camera when I pushed the shutter release and let the light in. The earth kept spinning, the sun appeared to keep moving, and life went on.

I'm writing this on New Year's Eve, a holiday celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of another. Except, you know what? Nothing is actually ending, and nothing is actually beginning! This is just a point in time that we have selected to celebrate time passing. And as is with many things, we all don't agree that this is the correct time to celebrate. See here to find out about Chinese or Lunar New Year.

Humankind has felt the need to mark off time since...well, since time began. We hear of the Mayan calendar, the Julian calendar, and the Gregorian calendar, but actually all are just ways to delineate the cycles of the earth, the passing of the seasons. In days of yore, when the majority of people lived on farms and grew their own food, these cycles were critical knowledge to correctly time planting, livestock breeding, and other tasks to  ensure that harvest and food supply was successfully completed with timing to aid in storage, safeguard the survival of livestock offspring, and so on. The Old Farmer's Almanac is an example of marking time with these purposes in mind.

The year 2019 has been an exceptionally challenging year for many people involved in agriculture, and I have seen many social media posts saying, basically, "good riddance!" But tomorrow won't be better just because we start writing 2020 in the date box on our checks (gah! even that reference doesn't apply any more!) The sun will set tonight in the west, rise again tomorrow in the east, and life will go on as it has for however many millennia. The most that we can hope for is to make it better and easier for those around us. Love will always win.

So no matter if 2020 is good or bad, easy or challenging, it will be what it will be, it's in our Maker's hands, and we'll be along for the ride. Let's make it the best ride we can.