Today is the shortest day of the year. The Sun appears dead on the horizon for a few days, but it always rises. In a few days the Sun will begin its ascent back to the North bringing with it more light and longer days. In this we rejoice in all that the Sun offers us. Life, warmth, and illumination.
"Solstice: from the Latin sol stetit meaning sun stood still. For six days in the northern hemisphere's December, the sun ceases its southerly crawl on the horizon and appears to rise and set in the almost the same spot. The ancients watched this quiet drama with drawn breathe. Wood the sun begin to move again? Would the light grow anew on the great wheel of life? Would life itself continue?
A few millennia and several hundred generations later, our won deepest questions, though not so literal as those of our ancestors, are nonetheless profound. Beneath our nuanced sophistication, we too, like preschoolers, hate transition. But we live on an earth where change is the only thing we can be sure of. And our silky bodies, webbed with wisdoms belied by the rushings of our twenty-first century lives, have the pacings of plants budding and light expanding. At the moment of winter solstice, we stand at the brink of external and internal change. This primordial turning of the year, both inside and out, has the tangled, branching rhythms of modern science's chaos theory. The ancients didn't call it chaos. But they personified those same meldings and shatterings in the cunning shenanigans of their tricksters who finagle the boundaries of what we know and what we don't. Now, at the winter solstice, we ask ourselves: What are the private and shared natures of our inner and outer boundaries? What is our place in the great cycle? What the actions and restraints required of us?
Since time out of mind humans have marked the externally vital crossing from dark to light. ... Though we now light our world with bulbs and take for granted not only the external day but often even our food, we still make the return of the sun's light a joyful metaphor for social and personal renewal.
...We await the return of the light, outside ourselves and within. Cold and darkness color and shiver the psyche. The sky turns gray. Fatally beautiful frost laces the remaining green. Rain pours. Snow drifts. We gaze a the mystery of the great cycle, full of our own deaths and births and lives. Where is the wisdom for this gateway?
...Like vessels, the stories [myths about the Solstice] carry us across the stormy, flotsamy, slippery edge of night. We cross over in three different ways: by theft, by surrender, through graces. ...When our personalities clutch their old habits, the thief may have to grab what we otherwise won't let go. When our deeper self finally surrenders to the new. And then, there are those miraculous gifts, those blessings that shower down upon us.
...The personality is always busy. It is making its reputation, building its stash, wanting admiration, wielding its power, enraged at the rejections an the invisibility. All else that could be, lies in the dark parts of ourselves, disowned, unexamined, pushed aside. But a deep power lies there, too. And out of the psychic collisions between the unknown self and the life flow of the universe uncoils a vast energy. Here snatches the thief's claw--perhaps in the form of a plot, an unavoidable circumstance, or a tumultuous collapse of what is. But the tricky purpose is to unseat the entrenchments and crack the certainties, opening us to the deeper than personality truths of our selves and our worlds."
The Return of the LIGHT Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice
by Carolyn McVickar Edwards
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