Happy Solstice!

I love the Winter Solstice for so many reasons.  I’ll try to explain some of them.

So many religious holidays have been built around this time, and I love those too. But,  the Solstice just Is.  All of us in the Northern Hemisphere experience this day no mater what our religious or cultural affiliation or background.

The days have been getting darker, from today on they will get lighter.  Nothing to argue over, it just Is.  As long as our solar system has existed this day has existed.  Just as we are able to function in the world because we can count on the sun rising every morning we are also able to bear the dark season because we know this day will come.  The light and the warmth will come again.  Things will grow again where now there is now only snow and hard frozen earth.  Someday this might change, but I am confident that many human lifetimes will come and go as we continue to mark One More Circle ‘Round the Sun.

So… it is a day about hope and about our shared human condition.  I’ll celebrate several other holidays during the Holy Times of Winter but this one is, for me, the concrete manifestation of all the ideas found in each of those. This one belongs to all of us. This one gives me hope and peace.

Light a candle.

Ponder the journey we are all taking on this rock, our shared home, as it spins its part in the dance around the sun.