SOLAR TERMS

chapter 24. RETURNING #3

This is a sequel to:

DAWN

This post has been translated from Dutch into English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon.

THE IMAGE of the hexagram: a chilly mass of five yin lines and one yang line intruding at the bottom. In the hidden, the odds are turning. It is still just one light line - more will follow later - one spark, one lit match, enough to give a glow of hope in the darkest of times.

Electric light dispelled awe of the pitch-black night. The return of the sun lost meaning. At the first signs of discomfort, you click the switch, and night becomes day. Overwinter in the south and the cycle of seasons comes to a halt.

In March, the spring moon, the wind turns and winter is forgotten. The Chinese of old smelled spring much earlier. They called their New Year 'spring festival', 'chun jie', 春節, around the beginning of February, when the cold is still deep in the ground.

However, the return we are discussing now takes place way before the spring month, and also way before the Chinese New Year. It is unfolding during the days of the winter solstice, the days with the longest nights.

Lent (n.)
’period between Ash Wednesday and Easter,’ late 14c., short for Lenten (n.) ‘the forty days of fasting before Easter’ in the Christian calendar (early 12c.), from Old English lencten ‘springtime, spring, the season, also ‘the fast of Lent,’ from West Germanic *langitinaz ‘long-days,’ or ‘lengthening of the day’ (source also of Old Saxon lentin, Middle Dutch lenten, Old High German lengizin manoth). This prehistoric compound probably refers to increasing daylight in spring and is reconstructed to be from *langaz "long" (source of long (adj.)) + *tina- "day" (compare Gothic sin-teins ‘daily’), which is cognate with Old Church Slavonic dini, Lithuanian diena, Latin dies ‘day’ (from PIE root *dyeu- "to shine").
Compare similar form evolution in Dutch lente (Middle Dutch lentin), German Lenz (Old High German lengizin) ‘spring. But the Church sense is peculiar to English. The -en in Lenten (n.) was perhaps mistaken for an affix.
etymonline.com

The I Ching describes 64x64 occurring changes, 4096 in number, so we are prepared for the fact that things are not perpetual. No matter how much we would like our happiness to continue, or how desperately we long for better times, rest assured that nothing is eternal and change will come.