First Quarter: Living by the Sun

Hello. It's Friday, and although it's several weeks past the solstice I still don't see the Sun above the tops of the pines until what my clocks mark as 8:00 AM. On a weekday like this I have an alarm set for 6:00, when the outdoors is still more or less pitch black; I do this both in solidarity with my owner's in-person work hours and because of how it's made sense to arrange my remote work hours on a similar schedule, but I have much more trouble waking up quickly (let alone staying awake) than I do during the summer. My typical weekend waking time makes much more sense right now: usually between 7:00 and 7:30, when dawn has already begun or the Sun has technically risen, or a little later if my body needs to catch up on sleep.

I try to avoid berating myself for not responding well to my 6:00 alarm in winter. I know this is the slumber-season, and that even if humans do not hibernate we still respond to the change in daylight by sleeping more, or eating more fats and simple sugars — conserving the energy we have and building up our energy stores. Seasonal Affective Disorder may be less a disorder than simply a pronounced version of natural instincts, or a manifestation of those instincts that reacts badly to capitalist labor expectations. Nowadays I don't think I have SAD in the traditional sense, more like the reverse as my anxiety grows worse with heat and light and humidity, but my body depends on the Sun being up before I can function much; and I don't like traveling around after dark anymore, so if the Sun is setting particularly early, even while I may stay awake for many hours longer I will be an evening hermit compared to other seasons. This particular year I've had to cope with the additional challenges of pregnancy and then post-miscarriage depression (in the physiological sense), each of which have sometimes made me take two whole hours to get out of bed in the morning, even if I'm awake. And I accept all of this about myself, in theory.

But frequently it's hard to shake the ideology I've been raised under, which is the ideology of the mechanized clock. I am not at all the first to recognize the link between precision timekeeping and the catastrophe that is capitalism. Capitalist economics depend on productivity metrics, whether labor is paid through a specific hourly wage or a nominally open-ended salary, and this in turn depends on measuring time spent on work, valuing labor as it relates to time. If time is "wasted" in this paradigm, it's wasted in terms of how it might be spent on something more profitable. We are pushed to transactionalize our lives on a monetary level because we need to make money, so any time spent not making money can begin to seem frivolous, even when we take time to do immeasurably valuable things for our health and relations. Spending more than a minimal amount of time getting out of bed is seen both as a lazy behavior and in many people's cases as literally not affordable. When we're told to maintain good sleep hygiene as not-elderly adults[1] by getting 7-8 hours of sleep per night and always sleeping on a consistent schedule, this is fundamentally correct but fails to account for our seasonal metabolic oscillations. It's just the closest to sleep hygiene that the medical industrial complex is able to recommend without disrupting the status quo.

Today, I am reminding myself that my own sleep hygiene asks not just for a rigid timetable broken into 60 atomic minute increments further broken into 60 atomic seconds. I live by the Sun. And here in week of the Moon's First Quarter, when some of my attention is given to arranging daily life rhythms, normally I frame those matters as applying to homesteading efforts or to what I call sacred domesticity; but to accomplish such things, I think it's important to bear in mind how they depend on living by the Sun, too. Thus, here are some thoughts on what living by the Sun really means to me.

Times with different time

When I was younger, though I have forgotten how young, among my various writing ideas I used to consider setting a fantasy or science fiction story in some imaginary culture where the people (human or otherwise) lived somewhere with seasons like Earth's but did not have fixed-interval hour lengths and simply broke their time up into relative fractions of a day or night. I didn't think very hard about what kind of technological paradigms this time system would help or hinder, but I at least thought a lot about how someone's day-to-day commitments would vary considerably in length. You might have some responsibility to fulfill "from 9 to 5" but if a visiting Earthling were to time you with a stopwatch you would spend much less time on that responsibility during the winter than the summer. To you, however, you would be spending the same amount of time year-round — it would just mean you felt that commitment differently in your bones, or perhaps you would finish more tasks for that commitment in summer. And then some kind of nighttime commitment would be more important in winter.

Cue my surprise when in my late 20s I discovered how of course medieval timekeeping systems, the ancient Roman timekeeping system they were founded upon, the earlier systems that was founded upon, and the timekeeping of many other cultures prior to the clockwork era were all very much like what I had thought was pure speculative fiction-fodder. I had grown up seeing sundials as garden decorations, but for a while I hadn't registered that sundials actually served a function for millennia. I knew about old tools like astrolabes and sextants, but I hadn't realized they could be used for more than early astronomical study — that indeed, nautical timekeeping used to depend on judging factors like whether the Sun was at zenith, and thus the experienced length of a sailor's day would materially fluctuate according to where their vessel was traveling.

If confronting solar time is as much of a surprise to you, a good way to understand it is through the Roman system, helpfully illustrated through Wikipedia's commons:

The horae (hours) of the day are longer in modern times than the horae of the night between the spring and autumn equinoxes, whereas the reverse applies between the autumn and the spring equinoxes. And each day and night there would be a slight change to either type of hour's length. But for someone who lived in Rome, this was just the way of things. As you can also see in this chart, the night-hours are also grouped into four vigiliae (vigils) because of how — especially in summer, I imagine — if most people are asleep at night there is less needed for counting a granular 12 hours.

Whether in Rome or other pre-capitalist cultures[2], time was once malleable in a way it doesn't appear to us. This is not to say our ancestors lacked any desire or means for measuring fixed time intervals, only that those means were specific to their use cases. Consider the hourglass, equivalent to and still used as a timer: you can measure only the amount of time the glass permits, so it's helpful for making sure an activity doesn't last longer than that measurement. Consider the water clock, equivalent to a stopwatch: you can gauge how much relative time has passed within the limits of how much water can be used at once, so it's helpful for comparing the lengths of different activities.

There have also been cultures who have used sidereal time, the closest thing to a pre-modern "absolute" time because it's calculated as the Earth's rotation relative to the stars, which technically drift but on the scale of individual lifetimes are basically fixed in our frame of reference. Sidereal time is valuable for astronomical study and many of these cultures' animist-rooted cosmologies are grounded in it. But because the Earth spins on its axis in a way that doesn't match perfectly with how the Earth orbits the Sun, sidereal time also gradually goes in and out of sync with seasonal measurements: as I've casually observed myself, the rising time of most stars advances by roughly four minutes per night, which means that a sidereal day is four minutes shorter than a solar day, a difference that adds up quickly.[3] When it comes to governing daily life, humans throughout history have by and large paid attention to solar indicators and thus seasonal indicators, especially the further they live from the Equator and the more they are affected by seasons.

Once I started to learn about this sort of thing, this older way, I longed to bring it back into the present, and I still do. Capital demands otherwise.

The beautiful tyrant

A part of me always dislikes complaining about mechanized clocks, because I find clockwork itself to be a beautiful feat of engineering and aesthetics. I love old clocks. I love deliberately strange clocks. I used to carry a pocketwatch. If I ever use a wristwatch again, I want it to have analogue gearing. Some of my favorite things to see in museums are exhibits of old or new automata and windup toys. And meanwhile, whether clocks still run on gears or are purely digital devices calibrated against a universal standard, they are useful in the same ways that their predecessors like the hourglass are useful; there is no cosmic crime in measuring divisions of time to help determine whether a task could be made more efficient for the sake of the community members who depend on that task's fulfillment.

So the problem with a modern clock is not that it exists, but why it exists and how it shapes our consciousness within that paradigm. Several years ago I listened to a talk by Wiccan mystic Katrina Messenger — a talk which unfortunately I am not at liberty to link here, but which impacted me on what felt like a molecular level as she spoke of how linear time is wielded by the hegemonic authorities as a psychic weapon against our connection to land and sky, Sun and Moon. Her words helped me intuit all the more deeply how solar, cyclical time is the birthright of all beings on this planet, and how capital robs us through the lie of time as something to always and only be unidirectionally counted. Time that always flies and can never be renewed. Oh, yes, it is true that each of our conscious lives are precious and should be spent the best way possible, but there is still a time before and a time after even if we don't experience it. And to live on an orbiting, rotating planet means to live within a Wheel.

Capital does not have time to appreciate this. Capital says an hour is an hour is an hour. Capital defines the terms by which we can "spend" our time. Capital places us in a life debt that can only be repaid through doing something for someone else who gets to profit by it, and to do that thing for them so long that often feel pressed to define our entire lives by that thing we do to justify our life. Is it any wonder that some many ritualists or people who are interested in ritual, magic, and similar practices often struggle with feeling inadequate because they don't have time for it? The fact of the matter is that no, you — we — are not inadequate, but we also sense we should be devoting ourselves to our rites more often because we should be, and it is infuriating having to fight tooth and nail for the time we need.

So the clock may look beautiful, but under present conditions it is a disguise worn by a tyrannical monster and rife with absurdities. As my owner and I complain about to each other every time we set the clocks back to the confusingly named Standard Time[4] and buy ourselves only a few more weeks of morning light before it's just pitch black when waking anyway: not only are clock changes themselves a preposterous and inconvenient biannual event[5], but we shouldn't have to work as many hours in this season anyway. The distinction of summer vs. winter hours in business has been fading for a long while; however, if the practice were revived, it shouldn't just affect how long businesses stay open each day, but also how many hours someone's shift can fairly constitute. 8 hours of work is already grueling and usually redundant — even people writing capitalist business guides agree. Imagine 6 hours in summer and 4 hours in winter, with no change in compensation.

Of course, with the burgeoning LLM[6] "revolution," capital is not going to help us automate the things that need it and leave us free to do the things that don't. ChatGPT couldn't have come at a better time to derail the Universal Basic Income discussion. What if, and here me out, the bosses ask, we took away as much fulfilling, creative work as possible, deigned to let some of you tell the art-machines what to produce and fix their mistakes, and then, well, still allowed the rest of you to starve?

Luckily, a strange and very thin silver lining to the ecological apocalypse — to the great eclipse before us — is that the infrastructure to support this delusional final form of capitalism will not stay operational for long.

Imagining & living

I think we will only ensure free, equitable, relational lives and communities that can survive any coming collapse and perhaps allow for recovery if we begin living and practicing those new ways now. And sometimes those new ways will seem to be old, not because old is always better but rather because a universally helpful practice is only visible in records of the past if the lens of capitalist modernity forbids it.

So although I largely do not succeed at actually living without a clock because too many other people rely on it, I have at least spent the past several years training myself away from the mindset that the clock gives me. I observe the Wheel of the Year as more than a convenient shorthand for a series of holidays that go by old names; it feels important to know and meditate upon the Wheel as a specific shape, to give my mind's time-sense a circular topography. I try to embrace each day's rhythms as simultaneously repetitive — there is only the now — and unique to exactly the light levels of the Sun within that period. I have made sure we keep a sundial of sorts in our garden. I perform a small morning ritual when I first see the Sun (or know roughly which cloud he waits behind) and I have begun thinking about a sunset ritual as well. As I face unemployment, I hope fervently that my next day job will be something where I can arrange my hours conveniently with different seasonal sleep/wake patterns. And while I used to incidentally sleep more and go out less in winter, now I allow myself these tendencies with greater and greater intention.

Gradually I have been noticing myself breaking out of entropic, linear time, and shifting into truly circular, regenerative time. In autumn I withdraw and make ready for less abundance; in winter I rest and transform; in spring I emerge and spend more energy; in summer I exert and give the bulk of myself to others. Each coming holiday, even if I have "favorites," excites me because feeling the Wheel come around again to another spoke is excitement enough.

And on a smaller scale, I am someone who has always struggled with arriving "on time" to something, for either I will be hyperfocused on something beforehand and fail to allow a buffer for delays (making me anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes late), or as is more common lately I will be so concerned with not being late that I'll allow an inordinately large buffer (making me sometimes an entire hour early). But while I know there are consequences for this in a professional capitalist environment, I also know my non-punctuality doesn't matter so much in less transactional, less entropic settings, and I am trying to be more forgiving of myself and in turn to be more forgiving of others whose lateness I used to judge alongside my own. I care more that we both remember to arrive to the same place at all. A 20 minute difference between our arrivals is not very important unless we only would have had 20 minutes to spare at all.

Mostly, I believe that human affairs could be very easily scheduled by a sundial again, or by rough approximations that vary by season. In writing this, I call upon myself to try shifting more into that mode, particularly if and when more infrastructure collapses to the point that "telling time" from a universal atomic standard may become more difficult.

And if I know anyone else who would like to live a little more clockless, do let me know. We can mutually try to schedule more of our gatherings in relation to the sunrise, the zenith, and the sunset. After all, I cannot make these changes in my life alone.

[1] Elders need less sleep than younger adults do, while infants, children, and adolescents need more, and their circadian rhythms do not necessarily respond to sunlight in the same ways; for example, teenagers have a more delayed sleep cycle than pre-adolescents. Which really means that high schools and middle schools should be starting classes later in the morning and elementary schools should be the ones starting at 7:00 AM, but tell that to the high school athletics lobby.

[2] As those reading here for a while can probably attest, I think about the Roman Empire a great deal, but not for positive reasons — so if I hold up a Roman example of something I endorse, it isn't because it's Roman.

[3] This is complicated even further by axial precession, a "wobble" in the axis that I have addressed this elsewhere when writing about tropical vs. sidereal astrology.

[4] It doesn't seem very standard if it's what we use for only four months out of the year, does it?

[5] If we are still using clocks in general, I support the growing political push to move my region to Atlantic Time instead of Eastern Time and then do away with Daylight Savings. We are so far east of other places on Eastern Time that the sun sets ludicrously early on clock-time during the winter when compared to, say, the Great Lakes region. Changing to Atlantic Time would mean permanently darker mornings on the clock, so in a way it's picking one's poison — but overall I think our region suffers more from virtually nonexistent daylight after standard business hours.

[6] I am recommitting to calling them Large Language Models. They are not Artificial Intelligences. I actually have some rather complex views on actual AI as it relates to human rights vs. what I will call machine rights, but there is nothing intelligent about any LLM. Besides often being a sheer scam that does very little a creative human being can actually do, it is an aggregate of stolen ground truth inputs alone, and I emphasize the word stolen. Human brains and other brains only really learn from external input as well — but the world is a gift to each of us, to learn from responsibly. That is true intelligence. At this point I consider LLMs very literally cursed manifestations of a dangerous magic, and I would like to not only credit their intelligence as little as possible but also acknowledge them as little as possible.

This particular post felt like a joy to write with the winter sunlight spilling through my windows, as I sat blessed by the safety of shelter against polar vortex winds. Thank you for reading.

My next Friday post will concern the celestial phenomenon of the aurora, and the following week there will be a post restricted to the Occult subscription tier.