Yesterday, the sun was shining in a cloudless sky. The night before had been the coldest we’ve had so far in a relatively warm early winter, and light snow had blustered in gusty wind, then laid itself down in a thin layer. In the bright sunshine, it lay sparkling on the grass. At midday, golden sun rays shone directly into the southern windows of the house, touching all things in those rooms with a warm glow.
On sunny winter days when we are blessed with even a little bit of snow, shadows are the longest and darkest in contrast with the white. I felt the tug to get out there, away from my desk and into the woods for a much-needed walk. I bundled myself and went among the trees in the last hour of daylight, when the shadows were at their longest. The forest floor was a weaving of spindly tree shadows over mottled white, and the line of trees at the southwestern edge of the wood were illuminated with rose-gold as they faced the setting sun at 4:45 pm. The risen quarter moon was high in the sky above them, promising to shine a little light as the sunlight faded into night.
Ritual as Embodied Poetry
As darkness ripens at Winter Solstice, I want to draw close to and linger on the slow, continuous transitions from shortening day into lengthening night, long night to short day. I want to inhabit these transitions, linger on the darkness and make space to feel the light begin to grow again. This attention helps me tend to an inner recognition of living as an earthling and to behold other lives, cycles and natural phenomena. I’ve also found that attending to the Solstice and welcoming it is a lovely companion for engaging with the season of Advent in spacious darkness: lighting candles, forming prayers and waiting to welcome the birth of new Light.
We are creatures that seek meaning and belonging. Intentional, cyclic ritual brings us into relationship with both of these gatherings that we desire. Meaningful ritual enfolds us in a sense of the sacred that we yearn to be connected with, an articulation of meaning that converses with our souls. It’s a poem that’s enacted, embodied, lived. It situates us within reverence and meaning, whether the ritual is handed to us by long traditions of religion and culture, or we create our own out of fragments that feel meaningful, stitching them together into a whole that deeply touches us. When we walk paths laid down through repetition of seasonal and sacred ritual, the familiarity grounds us and connects us into the depths of our lives and the wonder and awe of holy mysteries.
Our ancestors of many cultures had sacred Solstice observances. Many peoples who are indigenous to places that Europeans colonized, are working to recover and restore language, culture and sacred ways that were lost or beaten down through centuries of genocidal practices by colonizers. For those of us who are white people, European or with European heritage, these observances have also been lost in various degrees. We can see survivals of ancient European Solstice traditions at Christmastime in the ways we bring greenery into our homes, Yule fires and the lighting of candles, holiday foods and drinks, singing and merry making and collective practices of generosity. The Church saw an opportunity to layer over and adopt these ancient folk traditions to facilitate cultural conversion to Christianity throughout Europe, so we mostly attribute them to Christmas now, and the earthly connection has often been suppressed.
For those who feel rooted in their religious tradition, it’s possible for both an earthly and a religious practice to thrive side by side without diminishing the other. And for those who find little connection to religion or who have been harmed by it and reject it, celebrating the embodied and beautiful nature of this amazing planet of life, and its substances, cycles and processes, may offer an important and sacred spiritual orientation. I’ll suggest here that it may be deeply necessary for all of us to mend and tend to our relationship with the earth and our fellow creatures. Our very survival may depend upon it and many others kinds of life have already perished because of our disconnect. It’s hard to truly love and care for something you don’t attend to.
Homemade Ritual for the Longest Night
Because sharing ritual can be a way to reflect, invite, inspire and connect, I’ll tell you a little about the homemade rituals that have grown in our family to be practiced in the hours surrounding the longest night at Winter Solstice. We didn’t begin with anything elaborate, just simply rising and witnessing the first sunrise after Solstice. Slowly, over many years, we have added a little more and as it has developed, it has become a joyful and meaningful celebration.
On Solstice Day, we tidy the house and get our evening meal cooked while the sun is still shining. We place beeswax candles all around the house—these will become our only light sources for the evening, other than the lights on the Christmas Tree and fire in the woodstove. As the night grows darker, they’ll offer a warm fragrance as they burn and cast a golden light—light that’s possible only because of the fruitful, sweet and sunny summer labor of the honeybees who are now hunkered in their hives, keeping each other warm.
As daylight wanes, we make an altar, first laying down greenery. Then we arrange items in the evergreen boughs:
nuts in their shells, and pine cones
round fruits in sunny colors: a pomegranate (symbol of fertility and resurrection), persimmons and oranges as symbols to recall the sun
figurines of creatures gathered from the childhood collections of our grown kids: deer, wolves, faeries, birds, turtles, etc. and a large statue of “Treebeard” from Lord of the Rings
candles, including one that is round like the sun, and lanterns
When the sun sets, we gather around the table, lighting the Solstice altar and Advent candles. We share words before eating: seasonal thoughts and prayers of gratitude, a reading of poetry, and the daily passage from whatever Advent guide we might be using.
After supper, we take a walk through the neighborhood and onto a golf course nearby—night hikes in winter are the best use of a golf course in my opinion!
The rest of the evening we’ll hang out by the fire and the Christmas tree together. In years past, we made hand-dipped beeswax tapers from the drips and tailings of previous candles that we’ve burned. I have made a promise to the bees to never waste a drop of their wax, so I save all the bits throughout the year. We loved this idea of making candles for the new year out of the wax from the old on Solstice, but found it was very hard to do for us to do by candle-light. So, this year we won’t do it on Solstice. We’ll make candles after Christmas, before the New Year, and include the leavings from our Solstice candle light.
We try not to stay up too late, because we’ll be up early, well before dawn to witness the glory of the sun rising again on the morning after the longest night. Thermoses of hot chocolate and coffee, hard boiled eggs and oranges, are packed up and then we and go to a nearby park that has a lakeshore view of the rising sun. We set up chairs and watch the day bloom as we eat our breakfast with wintering geese.
I would love to hear about what is moving in you, in your home, your family and friend circles at this time.
Do you have or can you imagine the possibility of homemade rituals, traditions, or interior recognitions of being with the Earth and beholding light and dark, cycles, life and other natural phenomena?
If you are observing traditional religious rituals and customs at this time, do you see an earthly Solstice observance fitting into your season in a meaningful way?
Please share your thoughts, practices and dreams!
May the Blessings and Beauty of this Season be with you!
Connected Jottings . . .
A Poem for Solstice
Contemplative farmer, sage, poet and philosopher Wendell Berry, has had a practice for decades of going outside to walk and be with the earth and creatures on Sundays. He calls the poems that rise out of these contemplative, earthly Sundays, Sabbath poems. This one feels especially meaningful to me for Winter Solstice:
Sabbath X, 1982
The dark around us, come,
Let us meet here together,
Members one of another,
Here in our holy room,Here on our little floor,
Here in the daylit sky,
Rejoicing mind and eye,
Rejoining known and knower,Light, leaf, foot, hand, and wing,
Such order as we know,
One household, high and low,
And all the earth shall sing.~Wendell Berry
In: Wendell Berry, “X, 1982” in This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, Berkely, CA: Counterpoint, 2013, 47.
The Science of Solstice:
The word solstice is an amalgam of Latin: sol-, the “sun”, and -sistere, which means “stands still”. The ancients noticed there were two times in the year when the sun seemed to pause in a particular position for a few days, mid-summer and mid-winter. If you have been watching dawn rise for the past couple of weeks (or longer) from a location in the north, you might have noticed that the sun has been slowly creeping across the horizon toward the south. At the Winter Solstice, the 21st of December this year where I live, the sun will be as far to the southeast as it can get, and will not go above 23° south of zenith. It will stay in that position for a few days. After that pause in its movement, it will slowly begin to move back toward the north.
The sun will rise as close to due east as it can at your latitude, at the Spring and Fall Equinox, and at Summer Solstice, it will linger in the northeast for a few days in June before it begins its journey to the south once again.
This all happens because the Earth rotates on an axis that is tilted about 23.4°. You most likely learned this at some point in your educational journey, but many forget, or did not grasp it as a kid. This video is a simple explanation with images of Earth and its circular orbit around the sun that are more accurate than most that show a perspective that makes it look like we move in a very elliptical orbit. This causes misconceptions about varied distance from the sun being the reason for seasons. In fact, the earth is actually a bit closer to the sun during northern winters.
I love our family solstice gathering ✨🕯️ and that tree beard is always included in the altar ✨ and the Wendell Berry poem! I’ve not heard that one before ♥️