Sunset on Ice. Loch Insh, Strathspey.
After several sub-zero days the ice had built up, with shoreline pressure-triangles created by the wind in the initial freeze. The swans ‘trumpeting’ from the nearby marshes added to the late afternoon atmosphere.
Now? Thick snow falls and I’ve been out playing on my skis all morning!
As we cross the zero-point of the year with the solstice on Monday / Tuesday, and the symbolism of starting a new circle, I found this wee treatise below on the nature of ‘zero’.
“… Zero in a sense is not actually a number at all, just a mark representing the absence of number. It is perhaps for this reason, and the horror many theologians had of it, that nothing took such a long time to emerge as something at all, and in quite a few sensible cultures it never did.
The circular form that ‘nothing’ assumed reflected the indentation left in sand when a pebble used for counting is removed. Thus our modern zero, inherited from the Indians, began as the visible trace of something no longer there.
Like one, zero probes the borderline between absence and presence. In early mathematical treatises it is referred to as Sunya, meaning ‘void’.
It is perhaps appropriate that our zero takes the form of a circle, itself a symbol of one, and that our ‘one’ takes the form of a short line between two points. Each number contains the seed of its successor within it…”
– Miranda lundy ‘Sacred Number – the secret qualities of quantities’, Wooden Books.
Solstice Greetings – and wishing you a wonderful Christmas.