Winter Solstice

There is an interesting difference that occurs to me about this time of year. Today is the shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice when the earth reaches its farthest point from the sun and the night is the longest of the year. It is a time of quiet and stillness and snuggling in. In a few days it will be Christmas, the craziest time of the year and one I don’t particularly care for anymore. This is not about religion or the Savior born in the manger or any of that stuff. No War on Christmas around here. But it is about recognition of human rhythms.

The Solstice reminds me that we all need quiet times. We need times to pull into ourselves and take stock. To think about where we are, where we have been and where we plan to go. That is not a bad thing to do on the longest night of the year.

Yesterday someone told me about a tragic thing that happened to her. Someone she loved very much died quite unexpectedly and she was stunned and shocked as she left the hospital on, as she put it, the “worst day of my life”. As she was leaving, still too stunned to even think, a probably well-meaning doctor handed her a vial of sedatives and a prescription for anti-depressants. She was stunned that his first thought was to give her something to make her “feel better” — she didn’t want to feel better.

I marvel at her wisdom. We need to feel our feelings, to experience them to the fullest no matter how awful and rotten they may be. We live in an era where everyone wants to feel good all the time — be happy, be productive, don’t let it get to you. It’s everywhere — from prescription drug abuse to the abuse of more serious, illegal drugs. As I type that I wonder if “more serious” is the right term to use. Street drugs may be more dangerous, they are illegal after all, but the legal ones that you buy at the drug store with the approval and sanction of doctors, pharmacists and drug companies are probably far more serious because we are told they are okay, even good.

St. John of the Cross talked about the “dark night of the soul” — sometimes those dark nights can last a really long time. But a dark night of the soul isn’t a bad thing yet we are so afraid of them. We are so afraid of going inside and beholding those dragons and doing battle with them. Drugs and all the other avoidances are our way of running and hiding from the dragons instead of facing them. For me the longest night of the year is a reminder of that, as Rilke put it, “perhaps all the dragons of our lives are really princesses waiting for us to see them”.

This has been an interesting December for me because I made the decision early on that I was just going to let Christmas be whatever it wanted to be and I would be what I want to be. When I catch myself making excuses to people about why I’m not going anywhere and not doing much decorating I try to catch myself and reassure myself that it is okay for me to make this choice. It is okay for me to go to a few parties, call a few friends to go out for lunch, in other words tdo the things I cherish, and then spend the rest of the time being quiet and still and alone with a few people I truly love — the characters in my book.

So, on this longest night of the year, I wish you stillness and quiet and the courage and peace to look deep into your soul, past the dragon, and see the princess there. I hear she is a true beauty.

Thanks for reading.