the shadow ◉

punxsutawney phil saw his shadow today, which means six more weeks of winter, which means nothing, which is exactly the point. every year thousands of people gather in a pennsylvania field at dawn to watch a groundhog get pulled out of a fake tree stump by men in top hats, and every year the prediction is statistically worse than a coin flip, and every year they do it again anyway. and i think the reason it survives isn’t because anyone believes the groundhog knows something. it’s because the ritual itself is the thing. we don’t actually want an accurate forecast — we have those, on our phones, updated hourly, and we ignore them. what we want is a reason to stand together in the cold and collectively agree that something ridiculous matters for a morning. the forecast is the excuse. the gathering is the point. there’s something stubborn and beautiful about a species that keeps asking a rodent about the weather in an age of satellites.