She just didn’t seem to understand my angst. I was stumbling back to bed at 6:10 a.m. thoroughly angry that my cell phone alarm didn’t sound, and it was much too late to take a 90 minute drive for the break of the Solstice sun over a small pothole lake south of Willmar. We had passed the lake on a trip home from getting my son’s zither tuned when I noticed the dozens of muskrat “huts” jutting from the cattail-rich shallows.

From the expected direction of a Solstice sun, it appeared this was a scene that would make a nice image for my annual photographic depiction of light on this, the shortest day or longest night or start of winter or the coming of light, whatever one someone decides is the true meaning of their personal Solstice. How would this one work out? Finding hope within one of the darkest times of my life because of this disastrous political and humanitarian situation created by the vile human we have in the Oval Office, along with his enablers in Congress and the Supreme Court, and their deployment of masked “storm troopers” to illegally grab immigrants of color from their hopes, dreams and our neighborhoods. 

So, yes, I had a need to find some semblance of hope, of finding some way of adding light to my inner soul.

Being more “spiritual” than “religious,” and having been basically introduced to the celebration of light by dear friends, Audrey Arner and Richard Handeen, who once again recently hosted a bonfire celebration on their Moonstone Farm northwest of Montevideo, I began to take the Winter Solstice to heart many years ago. Their influence gave me a reason to take the Solstice seriously and to depict it with hopefully meaningful imagery. 

Capturing the significance of the Solstice began back when I was running a small country weekly newspaper and was in need of a front page picture on a rather weak week of news. Looking out the huge back window of our prairie-facing sun room, which housed our music and personal library, the lowered sun was breaking through the muted frigid and dismal haze of a miserable and chilly day. This seemed a perfect portrayal of our need to welcome and celebrate warmth and light. The year was 2009, meaning I was a bit late joining the bandwagon.

Though I’m probably no more of a pagan nut than any of my friends in our small universe, finding a Winter Solstice image seemed just as important to me as hanging a wreath for the annual celebrations of the Christian’s Christmas. Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, supposedly the first emperor to convert to Christianity, is credited for moving the celebration of the birth of Christ to December 25 in 336 AD to more closely align the celebration with the pagan Winter Solstice festivals like Saturnalia and Sol Invictus. This decision effectively and permanently moved the Jesus’ Annunciation up by some nine months according to biblical records. 

My creating an image on the celebration of light on the Solstice has continued ever since. Over the years there have been some anxious moments, for my initial intent was to in some way feature our dear Sol on the Solstice. That hasn’t always happened thanks to the increasing presence of cloudy skies, so it became more significant to feature light and hope more so than the actual sun. In the year of my retirement, which came with the passing of my wife, my image was made in the nearby Bonanza portion of Big Stone Lake State Park and featured the moon peeking through the hefty branches of a sturdy oak. The darkness of night more closely matched my feelings at the time, yet the light of the distant moon signified hope while the strong sturdy limbs of the surrounding oaks offered a sense of strength. 

On the following year, my first since remarrying and actually moving to Listening Stones, it was a grouping of late season gulls over the East Pool of the Big Stone Wildlife Refuge that seemed to portray a new sense of freedom and joy of life. The following three Winter Solstice years were met with days of absolutely cloud cover, and only late afternoon sorries into the prairie did I find anything close to a celebration of light. Light, more so than Sol itself. One was a muted “sunset” over a wetland of long dead stumps of an old woodland, trees reflected in waters surrounding an ice floe, and the last of the only “light” of the day as a break in the clouds offered an orangish afterglow peeking through a crack of a huge glacial erratic. Hidden meanings? Or simply a acknowledgement of light?

Every year seems to offer visuals that are completely different. Last year it was finding a pair of crossing animal tracks in the crusted snow where I’d taken the earlier photograph of the gulls. The woman questioning my angst, Roberta, and I were firmly involved in our new and budding relationship, our paths crossing in togetherness after nearly 40 years of friendship.

None of my previous Solstice images were planned … until this winter. Until my alarm failed. Life is mysterious, yet my momentary disappointment was real. She claimed I was a grouse during the day, although I disagreed. Then I followed my second “planned” option in the late afternoon lowering of the sun at a stretch of the Minnesota River near the headwaters where currents had created an interesting bed of jagged ice. 

My initial idea was to capture the tinges of colorful ambient light of an afterglow on the roughened edges of the ice tips. When I arrived, though, there was an immediate realization that the river coursed sharply toward the northwest while the setting sun was a good 55 degrees due southwest. A high bank rimmed the river. The lowering sunlight wasn’t close to touching the ice, and wouldn’t.

After taking some mundane landscape pictures, including one of silhouetted birds roosting in a distant tree, I sauntered down the shoulder of the highway to get closer to the river, to study the ice and the light. It was then that a faint glow of yellowish light beckoned from the troughs of the floe, and my thoughts returned to our dire political situation. Sometimes there is a reasoning behind the significance of an image, of a photograph, and I saw the light signifying an emergence of resistance in the depths of the blueish ice. ICE. Yes, capitalized, of our shedding light on Trump’s storm troopers enforcing his MAGA racist policies. There, in the depths of the icy Minnesota River, near the headwaters, on a cold winter afternoon, was my symbolic Winter Solstice image.

Two shots were made before I turned to carefully make my way back over the rough terrain and through the grasping grasses to the pickup, and I’m reasonably sure any residual anger was long gone and replaced by a smile of comfort and acknowledgement. Those cattail rich muskrat huts in the shallows of a wetland might have made a decent, visually nice Solstice image, yet there are reasons, often unrealized, why things don’t work out as planned. This image of emerging light amidst the jagged ice floe more symbolically captured our moment in time. At least for me, which is why trying to capture a symbolic image on this, on the day of the celebration of light, is so personally necessary.