Less light than any other day, less day than any other square on your calendar. This day, this Solstice of Winter for all of us dwellers of hemispheres on the North end of the globe. We call ourselves Chasers of the Light, dubbed this by a frenzied sprint through a forest of fading sunset, but often I wonder if we’re misnamed, or at least I am.
It’s darkness, I find, that I most often seek. It’s the quiet embrace of the lightless hours, the cradling by the shadow. Some feel this day as a forlorn one, feel the weight of its quiet and turn from it, distract it with artificial glow and race to shut their eyelids until sunrise returns.
Some do not.
This day, I ask for a gentle reckoning, I ask for a review built around compassion, around grace. I ask us to sit in the empty space the absence of light provides and look back, then look forward. There will be no harsh judgements afforded today, not from one to another, not from one to themselves, only a tender checking in.
What then do we say about the year that just was? What words to define the arc of what we’ve endured, embraced, and survived? What lessons have we learned, what images stand taller than the rest in our minds, our memories, and serve to represent it?
We sit in fading light, we face night before clocks say 6, morning long after 7, and we are presented with choice: We can rush through these months of dark and lasting silence, or we can use them.
We should use them.
Today, I ask you to glance back, I ask you to find your small victories, all those little triumphs that you probably never bothered to celebrate. I want to know, from you, what miniature battles were won, what overcomings. We get so lost in the rush, the hustle to be more, do more, make more, attend more, that we forget to slow from time to time. We forget to witness the fruits of the labor, to pluck them from the trees we’ve planted, we’ve watered, and actually take a bite. How long since you tasted the sweetness from the seed you nurtured? How long since that juice ran down your fingertips, your wrist, how long since you closed your eyes with its flesh in your mouth, leaned your head back to the sky, and sighed deeply out of your nose? How long?
Speak to me of your victories, then tell me tales of your failures. I don’t wish to know the money you failed to make, the deals that fell through, I don’t care about the jobs you lost or the things you failed to achieve, no. I want to know the times you felt you let yourself down. Tell me of the times you said Yes when your whole heart screamed No. Tell me of the times you didn’t stand up for what you believed in, tell me of when you failed to show up and defend yourself. Tell me of every missed opportunity to give kindness away so freely. These are the failures we learn from, these are those that shape us into who we’re meant to be. Who we will be one day down this long road of ours.
I ask you of what should be let go, what should be cleaved and hewn and left like refuse in the bins of our lives? I ask what battles should be fought no longer—around you, but more, within you. What grace can you offer the fights you’ve been fighting, be they to other faces, other bodies, or your very own in the mirror you stand in front of each morning, fresh from shower or bath.
It is time to stop hating the body you were born into, time to stop punishing it for being as it is. It is time to celebrate it for the things it has carried you towards, the things it has protected you from, the things that make it so beautifully and uniquely yours.
Now is the time to look forward, to see the year ahead as it looms just over the horizon of two final Eves, of a strange transitory period of holiday and festivity, family or a solitude much deserved. Now is the time to praise ourselves for being just enough sometimes. For understanding that not all things must be monumental, some can be mundane, and are all the more beautiful for it. For finding the power in the knowledge that sometimes, simply surviving, simply enduring, making it through, is enough. These quiet triumphs, these whispered wins.
What then but to call this day of darkness the soil we will plant the new year in? What then but to lay the groundwork, to use our fingertips to unsettle that earth, to use our palms to make the holes for the seeds to sit? What then but to water this soft ground with all we’ve reflected upon, all we’ve been informed of by all we’ve learned?
We can use this, never to dictate but to intend, and we can shape what will be in the gentle hands of what once was. There is strength in this softness, there is some ferocious power in the kindness we give back to ourselves. Nothing is more robust than this, nothing more lasting.
I will not keep you long, not this Sunday before the explosion of the holiday season truly begins, but I will ask more of you than usual. All of you. I will ask you to reflect, to use these short hours of light, these long hours of night, to meditate on all that was, all that is, all you are and could be and should be and will be if you only set down the weights you’ve hauled all this long, long way.
I know time, like sunshine, might be in short supply for all of us up North, and so I will not take up much today. I will just ask that you use yours wisely, that you spend some on all things inward, not just the outward projection of energy and care. You, too, deserve this dispensation. You, too, deserve this grace.
Happy Holidays, to all of you beautiful souls, Happy Solstice most of all. I love this day, for the darkness it affords, for the turning of the page it represents, more so than January 1st ever has. This day is the tipping of the scales, the rotating of this strange globe towards the sun that sustains us. This place means we’ve come through the longest dark and we’re running right for the light’s returning.
I love you all, all you were, all you are, all you’ll be when you get to wherever it is you wish to go. I hope you know this.
What a gift you are to me.
Soft introspection
in the fading of the light.
A year’s reckoning.
