“Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.”
While Paul Simon takes us in a different direction with the rest of his lyrics, those beginning phrases speak beautifully to me of this time of the year. The days between the Winter Solstice and Christmas are special to me. They encourage me to pause. They whisper, “Hush now, be still.” And I feel myself welcomed back home after months of activity.
The Solstice occurred Friday at 3:22 p.m. and brought with it 5 hours and 38 minutes more darkness than we had at midsummer. Our culture, extroverted as it is, tends to be more comfortable with expansiveness and outward movement. We are primed for activity and like what can be seen and understood with the rational mind. Winter calls for something altogether different. Darkness encourages receptivity and listening with an inner ear. Winter offers us an opportunity to turn inward and, by its example, calls us to stillness.
Attending to Earth’s cycles doesn’t mean we value one mode of being over the other. It means we recognize the gifts of both the Yin and the Yang, and consciously sync our own rhythms to them.
And so, during this time of greater darkness, we might pull down into our roots, like the cottonwood by the riverside. And rest. In our stillness, we may also dream, as the cottonwood dreams, of stretching our branches to new lengths in the springtime and giving to the world fresh shoots of dazzling green.
Dreaming, imagining, and opening to unrealized possibilities are exquisite wintertime activities. Yet we do these things from a state of repose, leaving the shaping of that potential to brighter skies and warmer weather. In reference to Paul’s lyrics, we may indeed talk with darkness, but now is primarily the time to listen to it, and let it gently guide us forward.
I took a walk in the deepest darkness of that longest night of the year. All was silent. The moon shone in her fullness with a vividness all the more welcomed amid such inky blackness. And I thought of Christ and the Light he shone into the other kind of darkness that is also part of our human world.
The Solstice is not only a time for stillness, reflection, dreaming, and rest. It is also a remembrance of the light and a time to celebrate its return. Its pairing with Christmas thus seems apt, with the return of a seasonal light calling us to attend to the Light of the soul, with its innate capacity as a conduit for Love.
So today, this is my prayer...May we greet the darkness of these winter days as an old friend, dropping down into the stillness it offers. And may the Light we find there illuminate our soul’s own path to a more fully embodied Love. Let it be so. Amen.
In Light and in Love,
Leia
