Welcome, everybody, to the 2023 Bay Area Secular Solstice celebration! It’s so good to see all of you, and to hear all your voices.
There’s more of us here tonight than ever before. (I checked the ticket numbers this morning to make sure I could say that, by the way.) And yet, unlike last year, we all fit into one room and nobody is exiled to the frozen wasteland of the simulcast zone, except I guess those who got covid and are watching on the livestream (hello).
So welcome, local friends, and welcome, those for whom Solstice is a pilgrimage, who have traveled here from far and wide. And welcome, everyone on the livestream, scattered all around the world.
And a special welcome to those for whom it’s their very first Solstice. Let me, perhaps, explain a little bit what it is we’re doing here.
Winter is hard, traditionally. At least if you’re relatively far from the equator, historically, a lot of your life revolves around planning to make sure that you survive the winter - to make sure you have enough food, warm shelter, protection from the elements. You have less and less sunlight in which to do things; your life gets more and more constrained.
Humans are adaptable creatures, and so we take this darkness as an opportunity to make our own light, to savor the comfort of our warm, cozy shelters, to dress everything up with twinkling lights and garlands, and hold great feasts in defiance of the cold and the dark, and to hold each other close and give each other presents.
But the dark is still there. Here, tonight, we gather both to build our own cozy imaginary bonfire, create and experience warmth and joy - and also, to sit in the darkness together, to acknowledge it and process it and grieve it, and to find our way through it. It’ll be fun, and it’ll be hard, too, but we’re all in this together.
Tonight we’ll hear speeches and we will sing songs - please note that nearly every song is a singalong! The only ones that aren’t are the two songs sung by the Bayesian Choir; these will be clearly marked in the lyrics slides. On all of the other songs, I invite you to sing. If you don’t know the tune - the secret to picking up songs on the fly is to actively predict what the next note will be based on what you’ve heard so far and your sense of how songs in general tend to go. Sing your prediction out loud, and then correct on the fly if your prediction is falsified. It’s calibration practice! I bet a lot of you will be better at this skill in two hours than you are right now.
Also, don’t worry about singing badly - we’re not here to sing as cleanly as possible, we’re here to sing together.
You may not agree with everything you hear in tonight’s program, and that’s okay. This is not a liturgy, it’s a reflection from one particular set of perspectives.
Alright, that’s enough talking. Let’s sing.
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