Old Saki Cups
We are a few days past winter solstice. The solstice is the shortest day, the least amount of sunlight. Every year as the solstice nears I am disconcerted at the rapid onset of nightfall. “Is it dark already”, I ask myself at 5PM. I feel cheated of sunlight by winter. Christmas is our resistance to the psychological funk that is triggered by shorter days, gray skies, and the cold. The Romans knew this as they had a festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Birthday of the Unconquered Sun) which was held on December the 25th. Sol Invictus was the official god of the late Roman Empire.
Do we not find festivals, ceremonies, rites unexpectedly comforting? My Jewish friends are celebrating Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, a eight day festival where a single menorah candle is lit each day.
On Christmas Eve four of us celebrated our good fortune with a sit-down dinner in the dining room. White china was on the table, the Christmas decorations were bathed in glorious light. Two large colorful candles were beacons of light. Never mind the dark outside, inside all is light.
After the meal we decided to cap off the evening with a toast. Five saki cups were set up on the table, suitable vessels for a shot of rumchata. The cups were purchased around 30 years ago at a Pier One store which has long since passed from the market place. The smallish cup’s proportion, surface texture, and subtle glazing are a apt symbol for life itself. Life in infinitely variable, and one never knows what one will get—until the cup is emptied. The cups symbolize the passage of time; from a time before our time, when the Japanese people conceived rice wine, over 2000 years ago. The cups purchased when I was a young man, and now I am 67. We touched our filled cups,–to life, to us, to family and to good health in the coming year. Is this act not a form of prayer?
Consider these words.
Occasions, such as our birth and death, and those of others whose lives we share, can be seen as essential to the lasting whole of things when marked by appropriate ceremonies and rites. But without such ceremonies they become no more significant than the stone we stumbled over in the path or the coin we lost on the subway. Each of the numberless events in our lives is then adventitious, and the whole is inchoate and merely a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Meaning by Michael Polanyi page 119
