Things I Love: Relishing the light, diving into the dark

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone!

This year has been a trial for many people I know. There’s been a buzz of stress, a sense of despair, and a pervasive gloom that has seeped into the cracks left by doubt and fear. This feeling seems to be affecting just about everyone, regardless of their health or their political or economic viewpoint.

We are children of this earth, we are made of this earth. We are alive here together whether we like it or not. It makes me wonder if individual parts of a colony of mycelia argue with each other while being connected as one life form. Humanity is an odd creature, full of fire and hope and dreams and also anger and passion and self-loathing. We swing from feeling to feeling, defy rationality on a daily basis, and yet we are somehow still here and thriving.

The winter is the time in the cave. It is the days of quiet and tedium, the days with less light. The days of shadows flickering on the walls, firelight, and time to do nothing but think and dream and create things and tell stories. I get contemplative in the winter, and often depressed as the light fades and the grey clouds roll in.

Things feel a bit different this year, and I attribute much of that to the changes in my heart, my spirit, and my body as I nurture a little light inside of me. I have a sense of hope and a new bit of steel in my spine that I don’t remember being there before. We change. Things change. Days grow longer, nights grow shorter. Sunlight shifts its strides across the landscape. We learn the cycles of our world and move with them if we pay attention. We can dive into the darkness and see what is hiding there, learn ourselves, strip the power from the fears that creep in the shadows. We can return from the Underworld to see Spring return.

And it always does.

Here’s to the light, and the dark, and everything that is.

Learn about the winter solstice in Ireland, and see the sunrise beam its light into the ancient site of Newgrange / Brú na Bóinne? Things get started around 30 minutes into the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Zv3EUmxP4