Now is the winter of our discontent…and how. Here’s the Atlantic’s article on California’s horrible Coronavirus predicament; suddenly we’re the worst hot-spot in the world. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/covid-hospitalizations-california-will-break-records/617455/

Yesterday was the Solstice; this year it arrived in astronomical conjunction with a rare planetary conjunction, that of Jupiter and Saturn. The “Christmas Star” was much gazed at around the world just after sunset, tiny but bright in the clear air. (There’s a song in the air, there’s a Star in the sky…) Just at the gloaming, Janet nudged me that it was time to go out hunting for the Observance, so I bundled up and went out following the Star through the housetops and tree-scape. I finally found it settled nicely over Hartsook Street, which just happens to be our local traditional-competitively-over-decorated neighborhood. Hmmm…another conjunction: the best that our two biggest planets can do, both merged into one; and barely holding its own amid all Earth’s vain, worldly, desperate, conspicuously commercial fossil fuel flash-and-glare. It took me a while to get a shot, as carloads of families streamed by gawking at the lights, and plane after plane after helicopter after helicopter zoomed across the indigo sky…..One clear moment! Click.

Walking home, mulling over the lessons of the out-shone Christmas Star, I mused that a better place to have Viewed that sort of thing, would be over at Swordfish Peak, Kas-ele-wu, in El Escorpion Park. Its slope faces south, and is open to the Western sky but surrounded by darkness. Suddenly I remembered the Chumash year culminated at the Winter Solstice, and Kas-ele-wu was the Southern Chumash holy spot in December, where festivals and rites of the season were observed. Imagine what a star-show they had in their nights. We had only one real star last night turn up in the audience to support the conjunction: she’s cheering loudly from behind the pillar in the mezzanine.