Last Sunday at 6:04 a.m., the sun rested exactly over the Tropic of Capricorn in the South Atlantic off the coast of Africa.

The winter solstice means nothing to us, sealed away as we are in our insulated chambers. We live in a culture that demands dominance over nature. We do not want to be put off from doing anything we wish because the earth may rule otherwise.

Rising rivers do not generally concern us. If by chance the water gets too high and invades our space, we demand that the space be recaptured and returned to its proper ownership as fast as possible.

Last Sunday the sun never appeared above the Arctic Circle, and the cold poured down the American continent like water sliding off a wet rock.

The storms across the upper Midwest are continent eaters. When they concentrate into a small space, they destroy entire towns, reducing them to shattered wood and dreams.

Our response is to defiantly fasten a flag to a broken tree. We will not be moved. We shall not surrender.

But last week, the cold did not hear us or even care that we were here.

The winds reminded us that just a few miles north of us was once, and not so long ago, a wall of ice over a half mile high.

Our defiance of such forces is admirable on some level, perhaps even commendable. It is an attitude that allows us to live well and in reasonable safety.

We don't track the solstice because we don't have to. Our experience has been that there will be food available, irrespective of what the sun does.

We will be able to travel without regard to flooding rivers. We can live where we wish, irrespective of the winds and the storms that lash the land that we believe we possess.

We no longer have to have six children. We have forgotten that between the rising of the moon and the setting of the next sun, four of our children could be dead from diseases we could not prevent or even understand. We do not have to bury the women who died having those children.

Nor do we have to mourn the men who in their middle years consumed their bodies in exhaustive physical labor.

The benefits of this defiance are easy to see. The dangers are more subtle.

It can lead to hubris when we come to see the fruits of the labor of those who preceded us as a birthright, a right the real world does not recognize.

The cold that falls out of the north does not care who we are. That cold filled in valleys and ground mountains down to their very cores. It once moved everything before it, and those that did not adjust, died.

Once when I was young, I walked in the high desert of northern Nevada.

I came upon several dens of kit fox. They saw me and dived into their holes.

I went over to their little village and stood looking at their homes.

Kit fox are relatively small. I was an invading monster. They would not come out and defend their territory. They would not put out a flag in defiance when I was gone.

If I never left, they eventually would simply move, but on this day I knew, and in all honesty, I did not know why I knew, but I knew as surely as the sun shone on my shoulders that if I became nothing but an observer, they would accept me.

I sat down in the middle of their village and remained still. A fox slowly looked over the edge of his hole at me. I did not move and neither did he. Then as if by some signal that I would never know, they all began to come out of their holes.

They watched me for a few minutes and then returned to their lives.

They scratched, they yawned, and lay in the sun like so many contented tourists at the beach.

Those foxes are all dead. None of their descendants can remember this, but I do, and that is the difference. And that will always be the difference.

My wish for us in this new year: remain defiant. Stand tall in the wind, in the flood and in the cold, but live humbly and do not disturb the foxes' time in the sun.