Winter Solstice

We have arrived at the longest night of the year.

Around the world, this day is celebrated with candles lit long into the night, circle dancing, feasting, music, and bonfires.

What has shifted in you during this time of turning inward?

What do you intend to create for yourself as the light returns?

 Sometime this evening, listen to the music below, and light candles to symbolize the turning of the year. Flip through your journal and circle the 5 words that jump out at you. These may be five words that recur often, or simply the five that leap out from the pages as you read through.  

Let each word become the seed of one line, to create a five-line solstice poem. Each line can be as long or short as you like; each line will incorporate one of your five words.

For example:

My five circled words are:  waiting, night, heart, joy, quiet

Here is my solstice poem:

I have been waiting here since the first light scattered itself over the snow.

This is a long night, a long wait, a long life.

Each lifting star has left a footfall on my heart.

Each call of joy from wren to wren has echoed from my skin.

I know it will grow darker yet. The calls will quiet. The sun will rise.

May you rest deeply and sweetly through the longest night. May the turn of the year fill your life with light once again, and may the seeds you planted in the darkness bloom and thrive!

21 Days of Turning Inward: Day Twenty

What are you ready to let go of?

What has happened this year that you are ready to burn away?

Some categories to consider: beliefs, events, attitudes, habits, memories, tendencies, people, ideals, judgments, objects, opinions...

Write it all out, tear it all up, and burn it away.

If you do not have a fire pit or wood stove, you can use a large earthenware bowl set onto the ground. As you watch the flames burn and the smoke rise up into the sky, allow yourself to shake off the dust of this year. (Have a pitcher of water ready, just in case....this has been an intense year and you may be creating quite a conflagration!)

The tender beginnings of a new year are germinating deep in the darkness; these ashes will fertilize the ground for its new growth.

Ordinary miracles of transformation are happening all around us. Let this ritual be a point of connection to the steady turn of the planet and the rebirth of spring.

Ordinary Miracle

I have mourned lost days

When I accomplished nothing of importance.

But not lately.

Lately under the lunar tide

Of a woman’s ocean, I work

My own sea-change:

Turning grains of sand to human eyes.

I daydream after breakfast

While the spirit of egg and toast

Knits together a length of bone

As fine as a wheatstalk.

Later, as I postpone weeding the garden

I will make two hands

That may tend a hundred gardens.

I need ten full moons exactly

For keeping the animal promise.

I offer myself up: unsaintly, but

Transmuted anyway

By the most ordinary miracle.

I am nothing in this world beyond the things one woman does.

But here are eyes that once were pearls.

And here is a second chance where there was none.

~Barbara Kingsolver

21 Days of Turning Inward: Day Nineteen

What comes up for you when you think of offering kindness to someone you actively dislike?

What did you choose to do for yourself and the person you disagree with?

I'd love to hear, if you would like to share in the comments. Your words might be the spark that inspires someone else to take action!

If you feel stumped, here are some things I and my clients have done in the past:

• left a box of chocolates anonymously in the mailbox of a grumpy co-worker

• sent a postcard of forgiveness to a teacher who had acted unfairly

• ordered a bouquet of flowers for a family member's birthday despite decades-long disagreement

• raked leaves for a contentious (and sickly) neighbor

"It was beginning winter"

It was beginning winter,

An in-between time,

The landscape still partly brown:

The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,

Above the blue snow.

It was beginning winter,

The light moved slowly over the frozen field,

Over the dry seed-crowns,

The beautiful surviving bones

Swinging in the wind.

Light traveled over the wide field;

Stayed.

The weeds stopped swinging.

The mind moved, not alone,

Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light?

Was it light within?

Was it light within light?

Stillness becoming alive,

Yet still?

A lively understandable spirit

Once entertained you.

It will come again.

Be still.

Wait.

                                      ~ Theodore Roethke

21 Days of Turning Inward: Day Eighteen

What is your 5th word? What question arose for you?

I would love to hear in the comments, if you feel like sharing!

If you are just now joining this journey, you can visit Solstice Day Two for the first part of this exercise.

Winter Solstice at prehistoric site Newgrange, in Ireland

Winter Grace

by Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow

under the lamppost

piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table

or somewhere slowly falling into the brook

 to be swallowed by water,

then you have seen beauty

and know it for its transience.

And if you have gone out in the snow

for only the pleasure

of walking barely protected

from the galaxies,

the flakes settling on your parka

like the dust from just-born stars,

the cold waking you

as if from long sleeping,

then you can understand

how, more often than not,

truth is found in silence,

how the natural world comes to you

if you go out to meet it,

its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,

its vacant birdhouses, and dens

full of the sleeping.

But this is the slowed-down season

held fast by darkness

and if no one comes to keep you company

then keep watch over your own solitude.

In that stillness, you will learn

with your whole body

the significance of cold

and the night,

which is otherwise always eluding you.

21 Days of Turning Inward: Day Seventeen

Some questions to spur you in your reflective writing:

What reminds you that you are the product of an ancestral lineage? Are there any rituals you keep that come from the generations before you?

When do you feel most connected to your community?

Is it harder for you to share the things you want with others, or to offer the things you want to yourself?

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

– “Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte, House of Belonging