Today marks this year’s Winter Solstice, Summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  Here in Manizales high in the Central range of the beautiful Colombian Andes, we are on the Southern edge of the Northern Hemisphere.  The Winter Solstice was one of the earlier dates for Christmas prior to Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar changes in 1582 more than a millennia after the holiday had been moved to December 25 by the Roman Christian Church in order to coincide with the birth of the Persian divinity, Mithras, coincidentally born of a virgin and died crucified.

A day for balanced reflection, for endings and new beginnings.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.