A Midwinter Night’s Tale
For about ten years, from my teens into my twenties, I spent the night of December 21st at a cabin in the woods with John and Doc Colella, a son and a father, and two of the best friends I’ll ever know. They’re both dead now, but I still think of them nearly every day, though as we pass through the solstice each year, they utterly fill my heart, my memory, my soul, and my interior sky.
Maybe John knew what we were doing the first years we went up, but I sure as hell didn’t. I just liked being invited. John was so brusque and cool, while his dad, Doc, was entirely different than anyone I’d ever met. To my mind, and in my experiences back then, compared to him, most people were like cookie-cutter patterns. Or perhaps, better, it was that he’d started with one shape, but it didn’t suit him, so he punched holes through walls and scraped chunks out of the level parts of himself until he was a wholly unique form.
If you looked at his resume, you’d think him a standard-issue, middle-aged man, born sometime in the 30s and living in the 80s. He was a dentist, as John one day became. He had a big brick house on Vestal Ave. He smiled affably and joked politely with the other grown-ups when absolutely necessary, though that was clearly his least favorite way to pass the time. He paid his bills and taxes. His patients loved him. He didn’t put on airs. He wasn’t an attention seeker or a brag. But underneath that, this raging soul and mind loved poetry, language, lore, and legend like no one I’d ever known. One year, he wanted to learn more about the local indigenous culture, so he learned to speak Seneca. I can’t attest to his fluency, but to even try . . . damn. Doc wanted to know stuff way more than he wanted to own stuff or talk about stuff or, god forbid, pose in pictures with stuff.
One night, when I was in my early 20s, he called me at work and said, “Meet me at the Casa tonight. I figured something out, and you’ve gotta prove me wrong.”
I told him I would, so at about 9 PM, I walked into the Casa Linda, our local, and he was sitting at the bar with his research spread out on the hardwood. It was a couple of old books on mythology — Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, a volume of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and a Bible open to Matthew 28 — a book of ursine anatomy, and an X-Ray he’d taken of his own hand.
I scanned the material and knew this was going to be good. Doc was weird as hell, but he wasn’t a conspiracy nut or anything. I expected this was going to be folkloric, religious, and frigging cool, but I had no idea where the conversation might go, so I looked at him with eyes widened to express my hope of enlightenment. He then said a sentence I’m pretty sure had never been uttered in human history:
“So, I’ve been trying to figure out the neolithic origins of the Christ myth — the resurrection and all that stuff — and I think I figured it out: It’s all Bear Clan shit.”
I stared back at him in love and awe while gesturing that he roll out the theory.
He flipped open the book on Ursine anatomy to a page with a diagram of Brown Bear’s forepaw in a skeletal presentation. Then he slapped the X-ray of his hand next to it, saying, “They look the fucking same, don’t they? They’d have known this, too. They were killing and skinning them all the time. The bear is just bigger.”
I had to admit, they looked mighty similar.
He then moved on to a passage from Frazer titled “Killing the Sacred Bear, “ which traced Bear worship across Asia, through western Russia, to Japan in cultures where bears were worshipped as a chief deity and prodigiously hunted. One of those peoples, as I remember, would capture bear cubs at the end of winter, bring them to the village, and suckle them at a woman’s breast. The cub would then live this life until it grew large enough to hurt people. Then, the clan would put it in a cage, feed it honey and millet for a few years, and worship it as a god before slaughtering it with ritual gore.
There was more from Graves and other sources Doc referenced from citations not getting wet from spilled beer, but he then got to the heart of it: Hibernation.
He looked at me with a “don’t you see?” expression while explaining that the bear goes into the darkness in the winter, then stays there — dead, or seemingly so — until he’s “resurrected” in the spring.
“That’s the story of Jesus. That’s the Bear as God. That’s what Matthew writes about Christ in Chapter 28. I think the Christ myth is an off-shoot of Neolithic bear worship, and now it’s your job to prove me wrong.”
I told him I couldn’t and haven’t been able to since. Moreover, I find a lot of comfort in holding some arcane, anthropological, possibly crackpot, barroom theory that makes perfect sense and for which about two-and-a-half billion people on planet Earth might throttle me for even considering.
Jesus is a Bear. Flipping amazing. Ha. But I only told you that story so you’d have some idea of who I spent my winter solstices with for those ten years in my teens and twenties.
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The first time the three of us went with Doc for the solstice, we all piled into his Bronco on the afternoon of December 21st and headed out to the farm. On the way, we grabbed some grub at the grocery store, some ammo from Dicks, some booze from the liquor store in Four Corners, and some smokes when we stopped to gas up. In a box were some colored streamers, candles, and copper wire that Doc said were for rituals and offerings and the like.
It was snowing hard once we got to the land, so we had to park at the bottom of the access road. There’d been a lot of snow already that year, and while plowed from the main roads, anything off-grid was totally socked in. The hike up the hill to the cabin took over an hour.
Once we made it, Doc sent John and me out to strip some goldenrod. We could barely see the crowns sticking through the snow drifts, but we got a few handfuls and brought them back to Doc like an offering. Which, of course, it was. Typically, we’d use whatever was lying around for a starter — old newspapers, a few pages from a notebook, but on the solstice; Doc said we could only use Goldenrod.
So goldenrod we got.
With us sitting behind him mugging cups of coffee he’d put on the percolator while we were out, Doc made a bed from the goldenrod, then he chipped some hardwood into kindling with the hatchet and made a teepee overtop. When it was ready, Doc lit one match — and it had to be only one match if we were to have an auspicious sign of a good year — then sparked the rod, which lit the hardwood into a flame.
He worked the fire for a while, reaching back to John without turning around for more wood when needed, until it was riding a good glow, at which point he leaned back off his haunches, stood up, removed the copper ring he always wore from his finger, and tossed it into the fire without a word.
That seemed strange, though I’d learn why soon.
After that, we made streamers of black, yellow, white, and red ribbons. The colors represented the four elements and the earth’s four corners. If memory serves, that was Hopi symbolism. I’m unsure how that fed into Doc’s particular blend of syncretic paganism, but I liked it. Once made, we hung the streamers around the cabin and went outside, where Doc climbed up on the tripod he’d built during deer season of three felled saplings. It had been his deer hang. Now, it was a high point from which he could make an offering to the sun.
Then there was dinner, after which Doc drifted back into himself. He grabbed the small bag from the box, pulled out a coil of thick-gauge copper wire, and sat down in one of the ratty old armchairs while John and I cleaned up the meal, drank more coffee, poured some whiskey, and blew a few Marlboro Reds.
It had been an hour or so, and Doc hadn’t said anything. He was working his hard hands against the wire, and while I knew I should probably keep my mouth shut, I asked him what he was doing. He grumbled that grumble, which said he was annoyed at having to say something so fucking obvious, then said, “I’m making a new ring. New year. New ring.”
I then asked him a fateful — and, as it turns out, an auspicious — question.
“Should I make one, too?”
He seemed perplexed by my simplicity.
“How the hell am I supposed to know what you should do? Do whatever the fuck you want.”
It was my first introduction to the notion that you could “do whatever the fuck” you wanted with a belief — no matter how important. Until that moment, I was honored to participate in the rituals and maybe even the religion of a man I loved and admired, who treated me like a complete human despite my being a teenager. He’d light my smokes, laugh at my jokes, and talk about poetry, women, history, or song. With John and his brother Jim, we’d sing sea shanties at the tops of our lungs. If he wasn’t driving, Doc was just as likely to get in the back seat of the truck and let me, John, Jim, Eric, or Mindy ride up front. He was different from other adults. He didn’t give a furry rat’s ass about propriety or social conventions or share the gentry’s concern for order and calm.
Now, he’d just told me that I got to CHOOSE how I would worship on this most sacred, most important, most profound, longest, darkest, coldest, blackest night of the year.
At first, I froze at the immensity — then I reached out, silently grabbed the wire to a length I thought would wrap around my finger at least three times as Doc did, and clipped it off. But after working for a few minutes, it didn’t feel right. First, I wasn’t physically strong enough to manipulate that gauge of wire. Dentist, though he was, Doc was strong as an ox. Yet, it was more than that, too.
Doc said this was my choice, but I was copying him, anyway.
After half an hour or so of thinking, I asked Doc if he had any thinner wire.
He got up without saying a word, rooted around in the junk drawer of the desk by the door, and tossed me what I needed. Then he nuzzled John’s head and kissed him.
John said, “Fuck off, Dad, I’m doing shit,” then kissed him on the side before we all laughed and got back to work.
Focused now, I clipped a piece of thinner wire about 18 inches long and started wrapping it around the index finger of my left hand above the second knuckle. I did that three times to form the main loop of the ring. Then, starting about 80 degrees off the point on the ring I wanted to be my top center, I began coiling the wire around itself in tight, contiguous, continuous loops. I wasn’t sure why I was doing this yet, but it felt right. Once I’d made thirty or forty of those coils, I had what looked like a copper spring wrapped around a copper ring, and I was nearly at my top center, at which point it would need to change.
At the top center, I bridged a gap between 1/8 and 1/16 of an inch and began wrapping a new kind of coil on the other side. This one had no order. It was intentionally a mess, a disaster. It was disorder and chaos in another 70-degrees of thin-gauge copper wire. When I finished it, I went to put it on my finger, but Doc leaned forward and said, “Not yet. That’s for tomorrow morning.”
By then, John had finished whatever he was doing. I honestly don’t recall what it was and didn’t even ask. Doc had finished his new ring, too.
We stood up and prepared to go outside, stoking the fires in the woodstove and our bellies against the cold. Then, we bundled up, left the cabin, and started hiking up the hill to the highest point on the farm. It took a while to push through the snow, but the moon was kind and lit our way.
Up at the high point, a field Doc cleared years before for this purpose, we hung more streamers, gathered some downed branches, and, with the candles, started a new fire. Once it was a proper bonfire, we took to hooting and hollering and doing our very best to summon the sun back into the world. Doc had explained that much to us already. In the months since we’d asked to come, he’d told us how that was our principal job: We had to CONVINCE the sun we were worthy of its return. We had to convince it that people DESERVED another year of life here on the planet, just like our ancestors had been doing since proto-Jesus was a hibernating, life-taking, life-giving, bear-god in the Neolithic Age — and probably long before that as well, because the Winter Solstice — which Doc always called, and I still call, “Midwinter’s Day — is the night of the oldest magic we hominids have ever known.
We dance in the isolating darkness of our own — our OWN — belief that we are worthy of another chance, another day, another year, another generation, another aeon, another life, and by so doing, we implore the light, we entreat the light, we charm the light back home. If we don’t, then it all falls apart in a terminal spiral of starvation and silence, frost and fear.
We stayed in the open field for hours until we were sure our streamers, songs, souls, and honesty were enough. The first rays of dawn shot over the horizon. Then we headed down the hill to the cabin, where John and I raced inside to get warm. As we did, knowing what we’d do of our own devices, Doc said, “Don’t touch the fire. Just make some coffee on the Coleman.”
The fire was out, but the cabin held enough residual heat to be comfortable after our long chill.
Doc stayed outside another 20 minutes before entering with a fresh bundle of goldenrod. John handed him a coffee, which he sipped before settling to sweep away the ashes of the previous year. Satisfied, he made a fresh bed of goldenrod, chipped a teepee’s worth of hardwood kindling, took one match, and lit the hearth fire of a new year.
Then he put on his ring.
I reached into my pocket and put on mine, too. It didn’t fit my index finger, so I bent it a bit and wore some iteration of it on my pinky for the next ten years. I don’t anymore. Now, that ring lives inside me as an endless circle of words.
But back when I needed the physical manifestation, I struggled, happily, to understand how and why that particular form had been drawn from my deeper mind. What was it about the long arc of Midwinter’s Day, the sickle that castrates the mistletoe tree, the once and future king, the Christ myth, the White Goddess, the Hopi colors, and the Seneca soul of my native land that drove me to make the ring the way I had?
I think I get it — or at least I get it enough for now: The ring is a contemplation of my place in time.
Do I, proceeding through an ordered universe, bring chaos and disruption, or do I move through this disordered world, doing my best to bring peace, harmony, light, and love? Which direction do I travel on the ring’s curve?
The answer I like best is both, always, and at the same time.
We exist, eternally, at the crossing gap of self, the top-center point of nothingness, balanced between order and chaos, light and dark, mystery and clarity, the torrent and the steady, rolling wave. I’m always barreling into a future filled to my brim with echoic memories that define the evolving now. I’m eternally hanging my first streamers atop a hill in Tioga County, NY, on a snow-struck night in the mid-1980s. I’m always winding and conjuring that first ring. I’ll never stop dancing with my dead best friend in the kind and giving moonlight while his foul-mouthed, shamanic, family-dentist dad cracks my soul wide open with a simple question and a follow-up statement, offered with love just when I needed it most — as a kid, still open to the world.
“How the hell am I supposed to know what you should do? Do whatever the fuck you want.”
And what I want to do right now is wish you a Dark and Daring Mid-Winter’s Day and a light-filled, love-filled, chaos-creating, order-disrupting, peace-finding, and trauma-healing new year.
And with a new ring successfully affixed to my old heart for the next run alongside the sun, I send my love to you all.
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