Winter Solstice
A walk through darkness on the way to light
Let’s imagine there is a shining, wonderful place where prosperous abundance is shared by all, where love is the guiding principal of existence, and where war has been eradicated. Imagine it has limitless free, clean energy for all, and its internet is all ad-free and tech-bro-algorithm-free, (like Bluesky) and where dishonest posts never make it through the system to see the light of day. Imagine everything you, personally, would think of as a perfect world, exists in this wondrous place.
Imagine it!
I really want us each to pause and think deeply about what that shining city, or small-town in my vision, or that entire gleaming idyllic nation, would look to us. How would it reflect our own ideals, fulfill our own hopes, realize our own dreams?
Take a moment. Make some notes. Write a few paragraphs about how this place would be in your mind. Imagine a day in your life in this kind of place.
I imagine never losing sleep worrying about money or bills.
I imagine going to the grocery store and finding whole, healthy foods on the shelves rather than ultra-processed garbage.
I imagine the whole place is a Blue Zone where people in thriving good health live well into their triple digits.
I imagine not feeling guilty every time my furnace kicks on or I have to drive somewhere in my car, because our free energy is renewable and safe.
I imagine plenty of clean air, plenty of clean water, and every animal cared for as a part of our extended family (because they are. We share 98% of our DNA with pigs, for example. Only chimps and orangutans share more.)
You know the energy that usually abounds at holiday-time? The way people help each other, smile at each other, give to each other? In my world, it’s like that all the time, because we’re genuinely happy, well, fulfilled, and free, and when you feel that good, it spills out of you. You can’t keep it in!
That’s my utopia. It’s green and lush, plants are growing everywhere possible, there are rooftop gardens, vine-covered buildings, Solar Roadways® are our pavement, sidewalks become paths amid green grass with fruit trees spaced every few yards, their fruit free for the taking.
The path to there
Now that you have a beautiful vision of what that place looks like, you have to find the way to it. Let’s say you discover that the path to that beautiful place is a dark, scary looking path. Do you still want to go? Is it worth the journey?
It’s kind of irrelevant questions, since we never have a choice but to move forward. Life does not permit standing still.
Many refer to these dark, scary stretches of our path through life, as “Dark nights of the soul.” And the one consistent thing about these journeys, is that life is better at the end of them, than it was at the beginning.
I’ve been through a couple of them myself, so I know whereof I speak. Personal dark nights are different for each of us, but they always force us to grow beyond the vibration that matched the problem.
I believe there are larger-scale dark nights, and I think the United States has entered one of those. So if that’s the case, it’s important to review the purpose of these stretches on the path.
They come to make us better people, (or the USA a better nation.)
They come to make us grow and expand
They come to kickstart our evolution
They come to force us to look past the problems, to the solutions.
They come to move us into those solutions, where the problems can no longer exist because we no longer match their vibration.
We match the vibration of the solution instead, and that’s how we bring it about.
How to walk the path
So you step onto a dark path. What’s the first thing you want? Light. You want light. In this case, we might not see any light out there around us, That’s because we are required make our own light on these darkest of paths, and to make our own light we must BE the light.
Be the light. Be the joy. Fill yourself with the positive expectation that at the end of the dark path there is greater light than ever before. And then proceed to walk this leg of the journey in the armor of light, which is joy, love, giving, kindness, generosity, patience, and a deep and abiding peace, because you know, beyond any doubt, that light always follows darkness. It cannot be otherwise.
In fact, darkness exists to give birth to the light.
The Witches Road
In traditional Wicca, the cycles of life are recognized and even mirrored in ritual, as the first, second, and third degree initiations. Each initiations is considered a death and rebirth.
During the second degree period of a Witch’s journey, the focus is upside down. It’s on the shadow side, on the darkness within, and on the physical realm. It’s often a period where the Witch will face challenges in her personal life. All of this is dark night stuff.
These cycles are present in all our lives, if we look for them. There are great times, then good times, then not so good times, then downright bad times, then back up the scale, over and over again. I believe each time we go up, we go higher.
This journey could rightly be seen as a deep and true Witches Road, both because it fits, and because I want to adopt and keep the term. It was treated so beautifully in the Disney series, Agatha All Along.
Don’t walk the Witches Road, DANCE it!
Fill yourself with joy, focus on the things that nurture you and your life.
Become a detective, hunting for signs of improvement even before you reach the road’s end. Look for glimmering bits of it that have floated on the currents of your rising vibration to greet you along the way. Know that the outcome you desire is coming. It is becoming. And you are helping it to happen.
We draw closer to it with every candle we light, wish we make, and spell we cast. We draw closer each time we flesh out our notion of what we want our new nation to look like, making notes, journaling about it. Writing it down makes it real.
More than just brining us closer to the end of the bad patch, these practices of aligning with light help to create the utopia we’ve envisioned are what create it. We are actively building our future with every ounce of thought we put into how we want it to be. And we’re reinforcing it with every ounce of belief in its inevitability.
We can begin in our own families, just looking for every possible way to make life feel a little bit better here and now, and mining our lives for every source of joy they provide and then blowing that joy all out of proportion.
The Winter Solstice
In the northern hemisphere, this is the waning of the year, and the waning of the sun. The longest night of the entire year will be the night of December 21st. A new year is born at sunrise on December 22nd. The sun symbolically dies and is reborn on the Winter Solstice, because it is the shortest day, and every day thereafter is longer as the sun gains strength. Spring is inevitable.
This is the exact same energy of each Wiccan initiation, and of our own human cycles. We are entering the dark part of the seasonal journey. It’s regular and it’s inevitable.
Maybe we can apply that to this large-scale longest night, and understand that the coming dawn is inevitable too, and that it will be brighter than anything before.
This is how I get through every dark night, personal and societal.
Observe the Solstice
Beginning now, meditate every single day for 15-20 minutes. This should be silent, not guided, just focusing on breaths and ignoring mind chatter.
After each mediation, think about the year gone by. Journal these thoughts. Note things that went well this year in one column, and things you didn’t enjoy as much in the other. Don’t get wound up in bad experiences & memories, though. But do think about what you learned from the experience, or what changes it forced you to make. Journal this.
And then think about things you’d like more of in the coming year, joyful, fun things that happened, things you wish had happened, anything at all. Write those in the good column, too. Really feel the feelings you will feel having each wish come true.
Do this regularly as we head into the final days of this waning year.
On the 21st, you’re going to cut out the column (or columns) where you listed the stuff you didn’t enjoy. Burn that paper outdoors or in a fireplace, somewhere the smoke can go outside, before midnight.
As it burns, ask the waning year to take all these things along with it, into oblivion. Also be sure to thank the year gone by for the good experiences and the bad, for all the growth they fueled.
For example, unwanted test results resulted in me upgrading my diet to an even cleaner, even healthier level, and I will live longer because of it. For that, I must be thankful. What’s the alternative, I don’t know until I have a heart attack? See? Bad experience, for sure. I was upset for weeks about it. But it spurred a positive action and a lifestyle upgrade.
As we burn the list of bad stuff, we must also release those events and experiences emotionally. We can’t keep dredging them up, telling the stories of them, writing about them, complaining about them, thinking about them. That keeps them alive, active, and present in our experience. We must let them go entirely in order to allow ourselves to rise into the improvement.
The morning after
On the morning after the solstice, I always greet the sunrise. I have east-facing windows if it’s too cold, but I prefer to go outside, even if only for a few minutes. As the sun rises, I might read or recite all the wonderful things from the year gone by that I want to take forward with me onto this next leg of the journey. And then I add all the things I hope to create in my life during the newborn year.
I expose my written wishes to the sun, then roll them up like a scroll, tie them with a ribbon and a little knot spell.
Knot of one, the spell is done.
Knot of two, my wish is true.
Knot of three, so mote it be.
I keep this lovely scroll in a special box for the year.
Covering my bases
I will also leave the scroll out on Christmas Eve in the form of a letter to Santa, with the traditional offering of cookies and soy milk. (Santa, you’ll recall, is lactose in tolerant.)
The things in the list inevitably become my New Year’s Resolutions.
Theme for 2025
After I’ve done this work, I’ll keep a tradition started with a group of online pals in the writing biz. At year’s end, everyone would pick a keyword or short phrase to hold as a touchstone for the year ahead.
I haven’t picked one yet. But after doing these exercises myself as the year winds down, I’ll know, and I’ll share it here when I have chosen it.
That might a be a fun tradition to pick up yourself.
What are you going to release into obscurity with 2024?
What do you hope for in 2025?
Share in Comments, if you like!
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