Have you been thinking about hosting a small solstice in your city, but were intimidated by the logistical and musical challenges?  Things have gotten a bit easier.

If you go to any past program on the resources site, at the bottom you’ll see a link “Autogenerated Slides”.  Similarly, if you use the program builder tool, you’ll see a button to create and “autogenerated slide show” (as well as a general UI upgrade for the tool).  It’s the same slide show system.

Along the left, there’s a list of all the elements in order, and a big button labeled “next”.

For songs, it will embed an audio player if it can, based on youtube or mp3 links in the song description, bandcamp entries, checked in mp3s or (worst case) midi-generated mp3s.  And it will put the lyrics on screen with animated scrolling.  The next button goes to the next line.  (I thought about various automated ways to sync lyrics advancement with music, but none seemed robust enough).

For speeches, it will just iframe the existing text. The next button scrolls down about a third of a page.

Advancing past the end of an element brings on the next one.  Backgrounds and color themes change with section headings.

Overall, you should be able to just click “next” repeatedly, with correct timing, and all the necessary audiovisual aids should appear.  (Unless you use a song whose audio comes from embedded bandcamp, because it doesn’t support autoplay.  This is deliberate on their part, because they’ve been burned by too many audio autoplaying websites and don’t want to contribute to the problem.)  And if your timing is off, the whole thing should be pretty forgiving to that too.

It’s not as clean as costume-made slides tend to be.  Sometimes the lyrics on screen won’t be a perfect match for the recording, or will contain awkward annotations.  But for a ten-to-twenty-people-in-a-living-room event, it should suffice.  Don’t trust yourself to remember stuff?  It’s there.  Don’t trust yourself to lead melodies in tune?  Sing along to the recording.

How do I recommend using this?

Hook a laptop into a big screen (giant tv or data projector) and gather everyone in front of it a la Petrov Day.  Make sure your lighting is provided by several distinct lamps, or has a dimmer switch, so you can go dimmer and brighter at section boundaries.  Have one person whose job it is to do all laptop interaction, and one person (maybe the same) who’s in charge of lights.

Bump up the font size in the browser until it’s too big, then back down one step.  Do this on the final screen, because screens and environments effect font readability.

Keep the event small (probably a max of about 30) and host it in a home.  Set expectations that this is a communal thing, not a polished thing.

Everyone sings everything together, unless the song really wants to be in parts, in which case give your attendees some direction.  For speeches, either rotate readership every paragraph or arrange in advance who will read what.

Pick your program in advance.  If it’s a pre-existing one, just know which it is.  If it’s modified or original, email it to yourself and ideally at least one other person.  Remember that the program builder has no save feature except what you copy and paste.  Test your program in advance, in particular make sure you’re happy with the audio.  You can override audio, but you need to either post your on youtube or on a public web server as mp3.

If you stumble upon a bug, please poke me about it.  I promise to be responsive so long as it’s not the same weekend as NYC solstice.

Somewhere on the edge of a Pareto frontier somewhere, I decided to make one of my shticks “founding holidays that fill important gaps in the 21st century.” Founding a holiday is not normally the best solution to a problem, but it sometimes is, and I’ve spent ~10 years thinking about why/when/how to do it.

Recently, I awoke in the middle of the night with a thought:

There should be a holiday designed, from the ground up, to be telepresent. Once a year, you should gather – not with the family who are geographically close, but those who are emotionally central to you, no matter the distance.

What should you gather to celebrate about? One possible answer is “your connection and closeness is reason enough. You don’t need an excuse.” But I think holidays work best when they do provide an excuse – some event to commemorate, around which the whole thing coalesces.

Two seconds later, I thought: geez, the coronavirus is just… actually a mythic level event, which is affecting all of humanity. We are forced to endure hardship, to rework our lives, to coordinate in challenging times… and to find new ways to remain connected despite physical isolation. The story of COVID-19 is actually comparable to the events that most holidays are founded to commemorate. It’s also a very weird event, which gives a holiday lots of little narrative hooks for unique things that help it stand out.

I think a holiday focused on that would have a lot of narrative power, and it would fill an actual important need. I think there are concrete reasons people may benefit from a telepresent holiday right now, but I also predict that coronavirus will have long-lasting impacts that will make it reasonable to commemorate in future years (Although the narrative may need to change over time to account for new facts coming to light. We’re living through history right now)

It’s the 21st century, and we should be expecting holidays and traditions to adapt to changing technology. There should be at least one holiday where “skyping in to see your family” is not awkwardly bolted on afterwards, but deeply interwoven into the central traditions.

Seder in Quarantine

Last week I participated in an online Seder – a Jewish holiday where traditionally, family gather for a ceremonial dinner and read from an ancient text, telling the story of how their ancestors were liberated from Egypt. Some Jewish friends of mine had written a “rationalist” version of the text.

This year, due to Covid-19 it was necessary to hold the Seder remotely – people made their own dinner, assembled their own plate of ritually symbolic food, and read from a custom booklet over Zoom. We weren’t alone – my facebook feed had other friends organizing online seders. The New Yorker featured this cartoon, showcasing families coming together over videochat:

“Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Rationalist Seder was exactly what I needed – it brought a bunch of people together and gave me a sense of normalcy/connection that felt a bit stronger than the previous ad-hoc Zoom Parties I’d attended during quarantine.

And the nature of Seder leant itself well to a video call – the reading is “turn based”, so people don’t accidentally interrupt each other the way they sometimes do on teleconference. After the reading, we each brought our own dinner over to our laptops and ate together and chatted for a bit. There were a few hiccups, but it fit together surprisingly effectively.

Because it wasn’t bound by geography, there were friends from Seattle, Boston, Berkeley, and other places.

I wanted to tell all my friends “hey! Are you feeling lonely and disconnected? Try a Seder!”… but, well, I’m not Jewish, and most people aren’t Jewish, and… the story of Seder really deeply assumes “you are a part of Jewish history, or at least the people hosting the event are.”

So this wasn’t really a scalable solution. But it was a proof-of-concept.

Possible Pillars of a Covid Holiday

This is all in the “brainstorming” phase, but after thinking ~5 hours, my best guesses for the central constraints here are:

Mechanical Pillars

1. Everyone is on a video call. I might even advocate that people who share a house split into separate rooms, so that everyone can be un-muted and wear a headset, avoiding echo and background noise. (I also think it works as a symbolic action – in future years, it’ll be commemorating a time when many people were isolated)
2. There’s a central text, everyone takes turns reading through. Some people may care most about the intellectual content of that text, others might mostly see it as an excuse to get together and the main purpose is socializing afterwards. This seems fine. But even for “basically-just-want-to-socialize” people, I think having the text gives a sense of purpose to the socialization.The text may evolve over time, or different people might create versions that fit their needs. But I think there can be commonalities across versions.
3. People make themselves dinner, using ingredients with a long shelf life.

Other traditions may turn out to be good ideas, but I’m pretty sure these three things will make for a solid foundation.

Thematic Pillars

Three interwoven themes would be Preparedness, Resilience, and Connection.

1. Preparedness. A century ago, Spanish flu infected a third of the world’s population. We know what pandemics are, and we know roughly how to prepare. But it’s easy for disasters to fade from living memory.One purpose of holidays is to remember things that are important, but easy to forget. I think the story of Covid is important both for remembering pandemics-in-particular, and for generally thinking in advance about rare-but-disastrous events.
2. Resilience. Across the world, I see many people screwing up, often disastrously. But I also see a tremendous display of people figuring out how to respond.I see a fractal pattern where, at every level (international, national, individual cities/states/provinces, and local communities and households), folk are saying “Geez. We need to respond to this. I need to make sure my people are safe. I want to make sure I can help.”
3. Connection. After making sure their families were safe, people went one-level-up the Needs Hierarchy and asked “How can I make sure I stay connected with friends and family, in this challenging, isolated time?”And… I think there was something important going on here that predated coronavirus. I think there’s been a vague sense of unease about thee last century, where rapidly changing technology has transformed a lot of social norms. It’s not always clear when this was for-the-better, and when it’s been for-the-worse. And even changes that were for-the-better can still be locally disruptive.

Coronavirus might be something of an inflection point: the point where the dominant social narrative shifts from “technology keeps changing in ways that are hard to keep up with and might be subtly bad” to “we can take ownership over changing technology and decide, on purpose, what sort of social connection we want in the 21st century.”

The fact that young and old people have all been forced to adapt together makes me more optimistic about this being a shared shift.

Global Scale?

Previous holidays I’ve worked on were focused on one particular community with a shared worldview. Something I feel excited about here is that I think this is a moment when a large fraction of humanity is experiencing the same hardships, and working on the same problems. And the conflict is “Human vs Nature”, rather than “Human vs Human”, which has the potential for a sense of unity.

But there are some obvious things to worry about here:

• Partisan Politics
• Localization

Partisan Politics

A central aspect of the coronavirus story is “people were often unprepared, and often didn’t handle it well – especially at first.” I think an easy, accidentally bad outcome to have here is for people with different opinions about Who Screwed Up Worse to end up fighting a lot. (Or, for the overall holiday to end up having more of a partisan slant than I think is ideal)

I can imagine stereotypical “Thanksgiving Arguments” (where Aunt Alice and Uncle Bob drunkenly yell about which politicians suck most) being dialed up to 11 here, and accidentally officially enshrined into the holiday.

I think this might actually turn out to be a dealbreaker for the version of this Holiday Plan where it tries to go global, rather than be a weird niche holiday for weird niche people.

A related failure mode would be to focus on overly-specific beliefs/worldviews/solutions. This could be bad for two reasons: not everyone agrees on exact solutions or best practices, and getting into the weeds may be unproductive.

My first guess for how to alleviate that problem is to build into the narrative text “Various people made many mistakes. It is important to hold people accountable for mistakes, and to do better next time. But this holiday is not about that. This is about the struggles we went through together, and heroism we displayed that we hopefully can agree on.”

Localization (and Globalization)

I live in America. In California in particular. My experience of what coronavirus means is shaped by my national and local government response, and my local culture.

I assume people in China, or Singapore, or Italy, or India, each have very different experiences of what coronavirus was about, what lessons to learn, what exact hardships they endured (or in some cases didn’t) and how they responded.

In general, I think it’s better when holidays are Specific. Don’t try to tell a vague story that isn’t really exciting to anyone. Tell a specific story that you deeply believe in, that you think is worth celebrating every year. Maybe only a small number of people will also believe in that story, but if the story is Good and True, more people will come to believe it in, and your cultural artifact will have a stronger core.

It so happens in this case, there is a story that is quite specific, while being much broader in scale than usual.

For the immediate future, my guess is that the target audience for this holiday should be “People who underwent self-isolaiton in response to coronavirus, or know many people who did.” This does not mean everyone – I think there might be underdeveloped nations with high population densities where the dominant thing was not quarantine, but crumbling infrastructure and economic collapse, and an appropriate response was not quarantine.

I think that scope is narrow enough to draw focus, while still being global in scale.

Jim Babcock’s Petrov Day ceremony (another Seder-inspired holiday), draws a lot of power from it’s global scale, finding quotes from people across the world during the Cold War. It’s probably still filtered through an American perspective, but I think it showcases how to assemble a narrative from different viewpoints.

My guess is that the initial “Proof of Concept” text for a Covid Holiday should aim to be similar (with perhaps an even greater focus on what people in different places experienced, using direct quotes where possible).

Later, if this thing actually took off, I would expect people to adapt the text to be more relevant to them.

Quality Writing

Rationalist Solstice and Petrov Day each took a couple years to  get their footing IMO. In each case, it mattered a lot that eventually someone wrote a centerpiece story that was highly polished, resonant, and meaningful. Each of those holidays underwent a transition in my mind, from “a neat thing to do with friends” to “Actually A Meaningful Highlight of My Year.”

I’m confident that Covid can support such stories, but not sure they can be found or written soon enough to provide a text this year. I do trust that in the longterm it’s a quite solvable problem tho.

How to handle Connection

Somewhat weird digression:

The Story of the Desert Ancestors

There’s a fantasy series (I’m deliberately avoiding naming it for spoilers, and may be misremembering details), where the protagonist meets a civilization of “barbarians” that live in the desert. They live in small tribes, but sometimes they come together for larger festivals. During those times, sometimes a ceremony is conducted where someone is welcomed as an adult.

That person stands up, and says their name. Then they say the name of their mother. And then their mother’s mother. And mother’s mother’s mother.

Whenever they get to a name where someone else in the room has the same ancestor, that person stands up and states that ancestor’s name as well.

Soon, this means that their immediate family is standing up with them, chanting names backwards in time. Then, more distant cousins stand as well.

It ends with every member of their entire civilization standing, chanting the names of their earliest common ancestors.

At some point in the story, they encounter a foreign “savage pigmy” character. There’s a nearby race of people that the desert civilization is sometimes at war with. They don’t speak the same language. It’s not clear whether they’re even the same species.

But one member of that other race gets captured by the protagonist’s tribe. He is injured, and ends up living with them and proving his worth.

Eventually, he is inducted into the tribe. The ceremony is awkward. He stands up alone, and nervously speaks the name of his name, and his mother’s, and grandmothers. Despite being a different culture, he too has memorized the list of his ancestors.

He works backwards in time, dozens of generations. Until suddenly, he hits a name, and someone else in the hall sits bolt-upright, surprised. That person stands up, uncertain, but then says the name too.

Soon, that person’s family is also standing, chanting names backwards in time. Then more people join. And finally, the entire tribe stands together, the newcomer included, stating the names of the distant mothers they all share.

That was a beautiful idea to me. It was a powerful example of a ritual that made me go “Man, I wish I could be part of something like that.”

21st Century Social Structures

I bring this up, not because I think this is directly relevant, but to highlight the sort of feeling that I’d like to aspire to with the telepresence and connection aspects of this holiday.

I don’t have great ideas for how to capture that feeling, given our existing culture.

It used to be that people all lived in close geographic areas. You didn’t have that many options about who your friends were, or who your family was, or where you worked, or what your traditions were. This created a set of constraints on how to survive, and build a culture, and find meaning.

In the past couple centuries, this began changing. People move cities in chase of employment or romantic prospects. Longterm multigenerational social networks are harder to support. By now, at least in the West, atomic individualism is quite strong, and technology rapidly changes.

Bowling Alone was written 20 years ago, and documents how in America, community involvement declined between the 50s and the 90s, across most metrics. I don’t know for sure how the past 2 decades have changed that, but I still have a sense of “many people haven’t quite figured out what kind of social structures they want in the 21st century.”

(Notably, I expect countries to vary on this dimension. My understanding is that China, particularly relevant here, is still particularly collectivist, although I don’t know much about the details. I expect different cultures to have different needs here. But I expect enough people to have this problem that it’s worth thinking about, through the lens of a telepresent holiday)

What seems significant to me is that telepresence lends itself to strengthening longterm ties. Maybe, as we move to new cities, we can cultivate stronger ties with the people we’re leaving physically behind.

How many people do you invite?

A question that comes up immediately, if you remove the geographic constraint (as well as the “people have to fit around one dinner table” constraint), is “okay, how many people do you actually invite?”

One original motivator for me here was realizing that my family used to celebrate Christmas All Together, but as people moved farther away it was harder for everyone to get together. And then thinking “maybe we might want to actually get All Together over Zoom?”

But, I wouldn’t want more than 25-30 people all at once. And whether I’m holding the event “for family” or “for friends”, it’s not clear where I’d want to draw the line – sooner or later you have to exclude someone who I’m actually fairly close with.

It’s also fairly common in holidays to have a space open for neighbors, or friends-of-guests. I think this actually serves an important role of giving people some incidental exposure to each other, and for people who don’t have as many friends to have an opportunity to get closer to people. But it creates a bit of awkwardness around “well, you invite random guest Carol, who you don’t even know that well, but you didn’t invite George, who you’re pretty good friends with [but, George happened to be in your top 100 favorite people instead of top 20].”

I’m unsure what to do about this

One (Insufficient) Guess

I haven’t come up with anything yet that feels as powerful to me as the story of the Desert Civilization Ancestors, nor that really addresses the “who to invite?” problem. But here is a stab at a connection-focused tradition:

Have one person host the holiday. They choose a smallish number of people that they want to deliberately cultivate longterm connection with.

Those people each invite ~two other people, with some eye for compatibility with who was in the first-order invite list.

The idea is not that all these people are going to be close friends forever. But they are choosing to share a moment in time, reflecting on how they fit into each other’s longterm lives.

The first phase of the event focuses on The Story of Covid (this is useful to ease people into the experience without having to immediately force a feeling of intimacy). In the the second phase (possibly after eating dinner), people take turns selecting 1 or 2 people in the group, and talking about why they invited that person, and what that person means to them.

I’m not sure how rigorous to be about it, but I think it makes sense if the first person to get welcomed is the person with the fewest social ties to the group, and for the final person to get welcomed is the original host.

Why this guess seems insufficient

There’s a lot I like about the above, but it suffers from a core problem of “actually, many people seem to have nowhere near enough default connection already established to really be able to do the above.”

Most “small dinner” holidays I’ve celebrated (at least with friends) had a large number of people who didn’t initially know each other. Nonetheless, over time, I came to value them, and I now consider many of them to be something-like-family to me.

So I think there’s something important to actually have a social structure for “everyone is invited”.

Meanwhile, an alternate problem is: “Jumpstarting Intimacy is Dangerous.”

Sometimes it falls flat, or just feels a bit awkward. Other times, people who try to cultivate too much intimacy end up feeling betrayed. (I have been personally responsible for one such betrayal, which I deeply regret, and wish I had not put myself in a position where I had to decide what to do with someone’s vulnerable information).

So by now I expressly disendorse “create an environment where people feel inclined to escalate intimacy dramatically.” (Though I do think creating an environment where people are given the opportunity to escalate it by ~1 notch is fine).

Tying this All Together

Whew. That was a lot of thoughts. In quick review, I think:

1. The story of humanity and coronavirus is a mythic level event. We’re still living through history and I don’t quite know how things will turn out. But I’m fairly confident it will be a story worth reflecting on for decades to come.
2. Independent of the previous point, the time is ripe for a holiday focusing explicitly on telepresence and connection.
3. Mechanically, it could focus on Video Calls, Turn-Based Reading or Sharing, and Dinner Made Of Long Shelf Life Ingredients.
4. Thematically, it could focus on Preparedness, Resilience, and Connection.
5. People can dial up or down individual themes, or adapt the text, to fit the things that are important to them.
6. I think it should deliberately avoid partisan politics to the extent that is possible (while not being unopinionated on the higher level narrative)

There’s a lot of unsolved problems remaining and work to be done. I will be honest – I’m not 100% sure I’ll have the time needed to do this justice.

For right now, I am curious whether this resonates with people. If I did a ton of writing (and collecting writing), logistical work, etc, is this something you can imagine yourself wanting?

If you run a solstice ceremony with singalongs, there’s particular value in:

• Doing at least 16 singalongs
• Clumping* them together in groups of 2-4, rather than alternating song / story / song / story. (Clumping is valuable even if you are doing a smaller number of songs)

This isn’t the right approach for all possible solstice aesthetics, but there’s a magic thing that can happen here if you do. And if you’re not doing it (i.e. most solstice organizers seem to default to the “story/song/story/song” thing), you won’t receive any feedback that there’s a different thing you could do with a magic, synergistic outcome.

Reasons to want more songs, and to cluster them in groups of 2-4:

• It takes people awhile to get comfortable singing.
• Context switching makes it harder to get into the headspace of singing.
• There is a secret, deeper headspace of singing that you only get to if you do a LOT of it, in a row, in an environment that encourages being thoroughly un-self-conscious about it.
• There is a long game that I think singalong solstice celebrations can help with, which is to restore musicality as a basic skill, which in turn allows you to have much richer musical traditions than if it’s an incidental thing you do a little of sometimes. The payoff for this comes on a multi-year timescale.

There are reasons not to want this many songs, or to have them clustered this way. Some people get more value out of the speeches or other activities than songs. One organizer of a small solstice mentioned their primary concern was “Have each person bring one activity to the solstice”, and most of them weren’t comfortable with songleading. Getting people directly involved with Solstice indeed seems valuable if that’s an option. (This makes more sense for smaller communities)

But my impression is that much of the time, the ratio of songs/stories and their placement was determined somewhat arbitrarily, and then never reconsidered.

Getting Comfortable

It used to be that group singing was quite common. There were no iPods or headphones, or even recordings. Running into a 1-in-a-million musician was a rare event. Therefore, it was quite natural that if you wanted music in your life, you had to make it yourself, and when you did you were comparing yourself to your friends and family, not to popular superstars.

This is no longer the case by default. So it takes people awhile to get used to “oh, okay I am actually allowed to sing. I am actually encouraged to sing. It doesn’t matter if I sound good, we are doing this thing together.”

For many people, it takes at least two songs in a row to get them to a point where they even consider singing at all, let alone feeling good about it. The feeling of hesitation resets when you spend a lot of time listening to a speech.

The idea here is not just “people get to sing”, but, “people feel a deep reassurance that singing is okay, that we are all here singing together”, and I think that’s just impossible to get in the space of one or even two songs. (It becomes even harder to hit this point if there are proportionately few singalongs, and especially if there are also performance-piece songs that people are not encouraged to sing along with)

Deep musical headspace

In my preferred celebration, “Deep reassurance that singing is okay” is only step one. There’s a second deeper stage of feeling connected to the other people in the room, and connected to ideas that you’re all here to celebrate, for which reassurance is a prerequisite but insufficient.

Step two requires the songs be resonant, and for you to have a strong sense that the other people in the room all have a particular connection to the songs. (The sense of ingroup identity and sense of philosophical connection are separate qualities, but work together to produce something greater than the sum of their parts)

You can get pieces of this in the space of a single song, but there’s a version of it with unique qualia that takes something like 8 songs to really get going (and then, once you’re there, it’s nice to get to stay there awhile)

Interwoven Story and Song; each Round Deepening

The formula I find works best (at least for my preferences) is:

• On average, groups of 2-4 songs
• Start with a song that’s a particularly inviting singalong, to set the overall context of “this is an event where we’re here to sing together.”
• Each song gets a brief story (like 10-30 seconds) that gives it some context and helps people fit it into the overall narrative arc of the night. The brief stories are not long enough to take you out of singalong-headspace.
• In between sets of 2-4 songs, there are longer stories, speeches, meditations and other activities that move the narrative along more significantly. Each one sets the overall context for the next 2-4 songs, shifting the particular qualia of “deep singalong” that you’d get from it.

Once you’ve gotten into the overall singalong headspace, it’s less necessary to do groups of songs – alternating between a song and a speech won’t kill the headspace once it’s had a chance to take root.

Your Mileage May Vary

Reiterating a final time that this is just one particular effect you can go for. I think it’s important that local solstice organizers adapt to fit the needs of their particular communities. But the effect I’m trying to describe here is hard to grok if you haven’t directly experienced it, and I wanted people to at least have considered an option they may have been missing.

[After the last song, the rest of the stage lights are turned off. The auditorium is dark. Only a single candle remains.

Four people take turns picking it up, telling a piece of a story and setting it back down.]

I. A Bottomless Pit of Suffering [Speaker: Nelson Lugo]

2016 was a very challenging year. For a lot of complex reasons, that I still don’t have a very good handle on. But right now I want to talk about something very concrete.

In a couple hours, you will go home, and you’ll walk past a person. Lying on the sidewalk, wrapped in whatever blankets they can find. Alone. They won’t ask you for money, because they’re past that point. They’re just trying to make it through the night.

You might not see them, because human brains train themselves to ignore things that seem unimportant, or uncomfortable, or beyond the scope of things you can do something about.

If you do see them… maybe you’ll stop and try to help somehow. Maybe you’ll just meet their eyes as warmly as you can. Maybe you just keep walking.

Whichever choice you make, by the time you get home, you’ll have walked past at least one more person in the exact same situation.

And the thought might occur to you – that it’s 2016. And we haven’t even beaten winter in it’s most basic, elemental form. It might seem like there’s a bottomless pit of unfairness, filled with desperate people and broken systems and that no matter how long you work, how hard you try, that pit will always be there.

And you might even be right. Because there is no long moral arc of the universe bending towards justice. There are just people. Doing the best they can. And sometimes their best isn’t good enough.

This is the secular solstice, and we don’t deal in comforting lies. But we do have story to share.

The story isn’t quite as clean or convenient as I’d like.

But it’s true.

–

II. Ali Maow Maalin [Speaker: Glen Raphael]

In 1977, Ali Maow Maalin became the last person to be infected with smallpox in the wild. He was a cook, working at a hospital in Somalia. He hadn’t gotten vaccinated because the needles looked painful and frightening.

On October 12th, an outbreak of smallpox was detected. A 6 year old girl was brought to the hospital. Ali Maow Maalin spent 15 minutes walking her to a car for quarantine. Two days later, that girl was dead.

In those 15 minutes, Ali Maalin was infected.

As his fever and rashes set in in the coming weeks, he didn’t report himself because he didn’t want to be locked away in isolation.

But eventually the disease became unmistakable. And the World Health Organization set to work containing the last smallpox outbreak. They identified 161 people that Ali had been in contact with, some living 120 kilometers from town. A total of 50,000 people were vaccinated in the months following his diagnosis.

And then, we waited.

A year past. A small outbreak at the laboratory, but it was quickly contained.

We waited.

And two years after Ali walked that girl to the car, we declared smallpox eradicated. Only a few samples of it were preserved in research laboratories in the US and Russia.

–

III. Something Possible [Speaker: Raymond Arnold]

When I first started researching this, preparing for tonight, I assumed that’s where the story ended.

But ten years later, a Russian scientist – the former head of the Soviet biological weapons program – came to the United States. He claimed that the Soviets had been stockpiling smallpox, planning to used it as a biological weapon. And that he had had a change of heart and dismantled the program.

We don’t know how trustworthy his account is. But there is a very plausible alternate history, where smallpox could have been unleashed again, and one of our species’ greatest achievements turned to ash.

And the most comforting thing I’m able to say about all that is…

…it didn’t happen that way.

We live in the branch of history where the cold-war subsided. Where the soviet biological weapons program was quietly dismantled. Where the World Health Organization developed protocols to respond to Smallpox should it ever be released in an attack.

This is not a story with a definite ending.

It’s not a story about something inevitable.

But it is a story about something that’s possible, when we get our shit together.

So if you are facing a challenge that feels insurmountable, and you’re looking around at 2016 and feeling like humanity is just worthless, and you feel alone.

Remember.

That there was once a pit of suffering 500 million bodies deep. There was once an invisible demon that ravaged our world, that crippled and killed for thousands of years. Unstoppably. Until one day we stopped it.

And at a time when the most powerful nations hated each other, when the world trembled in the shadow of nuclear annihilation… there were people working together. Doing their best.

Building systems flexible enough to be adopted in cultures across the world, from the largest city to the smallest village. Powerful enough to slay one of the deadliest adversaries we have ever encountered.

Smallpox killed 500 million people. But we live in a branch of history where it might never kill again.

–

IV. The Man Who Lived [Speaker: Miranda]

And Ali Maow Maalin?

He didn’t die.

He made a full recovery within a few months. And he spent much of the rest of his life helping to fight polio. He would go to parents who were afraid of strange people sticking needles in their children, and tell them “I was afraid. I almost died. But this thing you’re about to do is incredibly important.”

He said “Somalia was the last country to be declared smallpox free. I didn’t want it to be the last country declared polio free.”

In 2007, polio was gone from Somalia.

…

But in 2013, there was another outbreak of polio. And Ali Maow Maalin was one of thousands of volunteers working in Somalia, again. Delivering medicine and supplies. And while he was traveling, he was infected with malaria.

He died later that year.

In 2016, there have been 34 cases of polio. Total. And the world has moved, together, to fight malaria, and it has fallen 60% in the last decade. The work isn’t done and there are still organizations that need funding.

But I’d like us to share one more moment of silence – for Ali Maow Maalin. The man who lived. Who died fighting, to make his world safe.

[The last candle is extinguished]

Previously:

• Winter Solstice
• The Summer Solstice Paradox
• The Steampunk Aesthetic

For a long time, people asked “what about Summer Solstice?” and I struggled to answer. But last year, Brent Dill and I independently converged on fairly similar visions, and having had a year for it to gestate further, I’m pretty excited about it.

There are other possible conceptions, but here is my best stab at a holiday that mirrors rationalist Winter Solstice – bright where the winter is dark; embodied where Winter Solstice is cerebral. But, fundamentally a flipside to the same coin.

i. Off the beaten path

See the light as it shines on the sea? It’s blinding
But no one knows how deep it goes

– How Far I’ll Go, Moana

The experience begins with a journey.

This partly by design, but largely by necessity.

Winter Solstice is about the long arc of history. Summer Solstice is about the here and now, and why being human is something worth protecting. It’s about freedom, fun, physicality. It’s about figuring things out in Near Mode. It’s about building things together.

Getting a particular kind of Special out of that physicality requires a particular kind of space.

It’s not enough to find a small nearby park. Ideally, you want an outdoor space vast enough to feel in your bones that the sky is the limit. There is no one and nothing to help you build a tower to the stars, or to cross the ocean, or cartwheel forever in any direction. But neither is there anyone to stop you. There is only nature, and you, and your tribe, and whatever you choose to do.

If you live in a major city, this probably means you may need to undertake a nontrivial journey before finding such a place. The best places will be off the beaten path, and a bit hard to navigate to. If it were easy, humans would have already crowded around it. You might be able to have fun, but you wouldn’t be able to carve out a spot for your people to invoke a Sacred Fun.

As you contemplate this from your comfortable couch and think about the journey, you may find it daunting. If you attempted it alone, you might find it frustrating and lonely.

So, don’t attempt it alone.

Journey together. If you get lost along the way, getting un-lost is part of the fun. You may find something valuable in overcoming the obstacles. I do, anyway.

The best journey is one that borders on the mythologic – you pass through narrow passages, winding your way through wild undergrowth, slightly confused about where you are going but compelled onwards by curiosity. You cross a threshold into a fae-like enclave that clear communicates “you have left the default world behind.”

And then suddenly find yourself at the top (or edge) of the world, slightly unclear how you got there.

Sometimes you are lucky, and such hidden enclaves exist right in your backyard. But the efficient Other World hypothesis says that such unspoiled passages are rare.

There are many possible destinations you can choose for your journey. I suggest one additional constraint: As much as possible, find a low horizon line – a beach, or hilltop. Dense foliage is beautiful in it’s own way, but there is something valuable, for this holiday, about getting a clear view of the sunset.

You are here to celebrate the longest day of the year.

ii. Build a sacred space for your tribe

Ultimately, you are here for embodied fun. Build sandcastles. Fly kites. Wrestle. Play foot-to-face. Run barefoot in the sand. Cook together. Eat together. Go swimming. Climb things. Sing songs as you hike the local trails.

The border between ritual and non-ritual can be subtle. You can do all those things, and have it be a simple day-of-fun with no special significance. You can do all those things, and choose to imbue it with transformative, symbolic power. The power is greater if it involves sacrifice. The sacrifice is more potent if it is resonant – a costly signal, but not an arbitrary one.

You are here to become – or to remind yourself that you are – a tribe.

And there is something special about building something together, greater than any of you could have built on your own, to make this fact true in your gut.

There are different aesthetics you can bring to this. Last year, the NYC community journeyed to Long Island, near some old ruins, and built a temple of heavy driftwood logs that nobody could have even lifted on their own.

In the Bay Area, Brent and his crew organized a giant dome build. Less primeval, more steampunk. A couple dozen people worked in tandem, half of them holding up a 50 foot, 600 pound sphere of steel while others darted around tightening bolts. If anyone had fucked up, the whole thing would come tumbling down. Then they hung silks and put a trampoline in it.

Whether primeval, steampunk or otherwise, the key is cooperation, and to fully engage the human experience. Solve physics puzzles that are not just about thinking at a computer screen, but which require you to be embodied. Sensory Experience. High challenge. Living by your own strength.

Then, take a step back, and marvel at the monument you have built to yourselves, and the space you have created.

And play.

The 2017 Bay Summer Solstice Dome

iii. Winter is Coming

That all seemed well and good to me. It was the plan I and the NYC rationalists went to Long Island with. But when we got there, and set about building a temple of driftwood, we were presented with a question:

How should we design our temple, such that it oriented around the longest day. Could we align it with the sunset?

This was a physics question, and an engineering one.

Where on the horizon, precisely, will the sun set?

With nothing but crude physical tools and the naked eye, could we figure it out? Could we do so with enough time left over to erect a set of pillars lining the sun?

And then, it all clicked together.

Winter Solstice celebrates the birth of astronomy – the human ability to look up at the sky, predict when the seasons will change, plant your grains at the right time, plan for the coming darkness. The long, slow bootstrapping of humanity. Building the tools that built the tools that built the tools that built the cities around us. Culminating in the ability to look out in the universe and know exactly what is going on. To send machines into space and turn around and see our home, in our obscurity, in all this vastness, and think “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” And know that there is no hint that anyone out there will save us from ourselves.

The ability to look into a murky, uncertain future, and plan.

And now, here we were, actually having to begin that journey ourselves from something-like-first-principles, and it didn’t even feel contrived. The connection to Winter Solstice didn’t require any grim speeches or cerebral songs. It just was.

My favorite part: Those pillar we placed?

That was our confidence interval. The more clearly we could predict sunset, the closer together we could afford to place them. As it turns out, we were off by about a foot. But the problem left a number of ways to scale the difficulty in future years, building towards more precision as our skills increased.

The 2017 NYC Summer Solstice temple

iv. Next

Real holidays are not created. They evolve.

– Secular Solstice Hymnal

Right now, the vision depicted above feels approximately like Winter Solstice 2011 – the broad strokes are there, but a lot of the pieces will require some finessing, settling into place, or evolving based on the local needs of your community.

Moreso than Winter Solstice as, Summer Solstice demands an environment of improvisation and whimsy. It benefits from people bringing cool idea to try out. Do you know how to fire-twirl? Play guitar? Teach Acro Yoga? Have some random cool outdoor toy? Go for it, and don’t worry overmuch of if it all fits neatly together.

I think plenty of people won’t be interested in the Building of the Space, or might want to contribute their own thing to it, and that’s fine. At NYC 2017, some people were erecting the pillars, or measuring shadows to calculate sunset, while others built sand-art to go along with it, or just went off to swim or explore.

I think having at least a small group of people building the central monument helps to give all the rest of the kite-flying, swimming, climbing, wrestling, barbecue etc an underlying sense of purpose – a thing that we might come together to do once a year, to be a tribe together in a way that is in some sense sacred.

You may have noticed my previous two posts had links to a new website: secularsolstice.github.io. This website is my attempt to gather all solstice-related content in a single place. Up until now, it’s been scattered across a variety of blogs and Google docs in a rather disorganized fashion.

This website is a work in progress, but it has reached the Useful stage. Its goals are:

Easy to Browse

The website is trying to be comfortable for anyone to browse: navigable, pretty, readable. Also, leaving a dozen tabs of it open shouldn’t cause my browser to lock up (let us take a moment to glare at Google docs and even harder at Facebook for their respective javascript memory leaks).

All Sorts of Content

There are lyrics, chord charts, sheet music, audio recordings, discussions of how a song can be used…

A lot of other options would have difficulty with some of these things. This website should be able to host it all, in a comfortable way.

Granted, I’ve left videos on youtube and provided links. I’m not sure if there’s a quantity of data at which github complains about hosting, but video might push it.

Single Point of Truth

The summary of a song in a list should match its summary on its own page. The lyrics in the chord chart should match the ones in the lyrics sheet. And any of these things should be changeable without having to keep them together manually.

A particularly important case of this is sheet music formatting. There’s no universally accepted format. PDF is nice to read, but impractical to do anything else with. So we want both the universally readable PDF and the source format (Lilypond, ABC, etc.), and we don’t want to worry about them being out of sync.

Robust Hosting

No downtime. No “forgot to renew, now an extortionist has it”. No ads. No games.

Relatedly, the URLs are clear, concise and stable.

Oh, and I don’t want to pay for this.

Practical to Contribute To

I have write access to several of the Google sheets and folders. I’ve barely used it. Why?

I’m worried I’ll step on someone’s toes. That I’ll be adding things that don’t belong. That I’ll break something. That I’ll try to write at the same time as someone else and make a mess.

Here we have explicit, annotated histories. So if a contribution breaks something, the break can be reverted. And we have pull requests, so someone can say “Here are the exact changes I would like to make, are they good?” and someone more central can accept or reject them easily.

Seriously, though, Git?

I realize git isn’t the easiest thing to use. And that it’s not ubiquitous the way wikis and Google docs are.

For simple things, the web interface is available, and it really isn’t bad. I’ve written some instructions, though I admit no one has tested them.

It may turn out that this is still too heavy weight a process. All I can say is that I haven’t seen a successful project like this, so we have to explore.

And Github offers the first four points, which no other option I could think of did. At least not without a ton of work.

As for the rest of Git’s features, the history and branching… Maybe we’ll use them meaningfully and maybe we won’t. They are a reasonably close fit to how we operate, but they aren’t easy to expose through the pretty website. As more use accumulates, we’ll see.

For Now, Send Stuff

There’s content not on the site. Probably songs. Definitely speeches. Lots of setlists.

If you have them, please send them!

If you feel up to it, send a pull request. If you run into trouble doing so, let me know.

If you don’t feel up to that, don’t worry about it. Send an email (dspeyer [at] gmail [dot] com) or leave a comment here or do whatever’s easiest.

If there are things you’d like to see the site do that it currently doesn’t, let me know that too. I make no promises, but I’m interested.

Countless winter nights ago,
A woman shivered in the cold.
Cursed the skies, and wondered why
The gods invented pain.

Aching angry flesh and bone,
Bitterly she struck the stone
Till she saw the sudden spark
Of light, and golden flame.

She showed the others, but they told her
She was not fit to control
The primal forces that the gods
Had cloaked in mystery

But she would not be satisfied,
And though she trembled, she defied them
Took her torch and raised it high
Set afire history.

CHORUS:

Tomorrow can be brighter than
today, although the night is cold.
The stars may seem so very far
away…

But courage, hope and reason burn,
In every mind, each lesson learned,
Shining light to guide our way (Bm)
Make tomorrow brighter than to-day…
…
Oh…………….
Oh…………….
Oh… Brighter than to-day.

VERSE 2

Ages long forgotten now,
We built the wheel and then the plough.
Tilled the earth and proved our worth,
Against the drought and snow.

Soon we had the time to fathom
Mountain peaks and tiny atoms,
Beating hearts electric sparks
So much more to know.

CHORUS:
Tomorrow can be brighter than to-day
although the night is cold.
The stars may seem so very far
away…

But courage, hope and reason grow,
With every passing season so we’ll
Drive the darkness far away… (Bm)
Make tomorrow brighter than to-day…

Oh…………….
Oh…………….
Oh… Brighter than to-day.

VERSE 3

The universe may seem unfair.
The laws of nature may not care.
The storms and quakes, our own mistakes,
They nearly doused our flame.

But all these trials we’ve endured
The lessons learned, diseases cured
Against our herculean task
We’ve risen to proclaim.

CHORUS:

Tomorrow can be brighter than to-day
Although the night is cold.
The stars may seem so very far
Away…

But courage, hope and reason bloom,
Across the world and one day soon we’ll
Rise up to the stars and say…
Make tomorrow brighter than to-day…
………………
Oh…………….
Oh…………….
Oh…………….
Oh…………….
Oh… Brighter than to-day. see less