Winter Solstice occurs this year on
Saturday, December 21st, 2019
at 8:19 pm Pacific Time.
This is one of the most celebrated turnings of the year in the Northern Hemisphere as it indicates the beginning of the return of the light as Eairth begins to rotate so that every day, the Northern Hemisphere tilts more toward the sun. The daylight hours begin to grow and the sun rises higher into the sky.
“It is sometimes said that we are born as strangers
into the world and that we leave it when we die.
But in all probability we do not come into the world at all.
Rather we come out of it in the same way
a leaf comes out of a tree or a baby from its mother’s body.
We emerge deep from within its range of possibilities…”
~ Barbara Holleroth in A Chosen Faith, p. 16.
And so it is on Winter Solstice that we can re-enter once gain this feeling of emerging out of the deepest darkness of the year…
Out of the soft, enveloping holding of the fertile womb of creation.
Out of the dark, spacious, luminous void.
Out of the starlit nights of dreaming and visioning.
We emerge within the possibilities of the darkness,
Within the not-yet-made manifest,
Within the imaginal, dream of Eairth.
Not separate,
but made of this darkness,
of this fertile ground
and vast void of creative possibility.
As the light begins to grow again and our dreaming takes form, let us still remember the gifts of the darkness, allowing ourselves to be shaped by them, made by them, created, birthed into this new light from within them.
On this Winter Solstice, I invite you into a brief ritual to re-enact this emergence from within the darkness into the light.
Start by sitting in the dark and breathing. You might like to listen to a guided grounding meditation, or to read/practice the Thich Nhat Hanh breathing meditation from my last blogpost. You may also want to spend a little time in silence, just being with the dark.
When you are ready, light a candle and contemplate these questions either in your journal or out loud, perhaps even with a friend:
What has the darkness been dreaming in you?
What fertile ground within is preparing itself to grow?
What possibilities want to emerge and be born through you into the growing light?
And how will you practice allowing the fertile darkness of possibility to come to fullness as it takes form in the light through you?
Eairth = Earth and Air
Image by Rene Rauschenberger from Pixabay (cropped)
Nourishing Wholeness 