Winter Solstice 2020
By: Gary Gach
Tags: Health, Mindfulness, Life, Spirituality, Astrology

Winter Solstice 2020

This is about this very moment. This wonderful moment. Have you noticed? This week gives us the solstice. From the 20th to the 21st, to be precise. The shortest day of the year, and the longest night. My indigenous brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles, understand this very well, as have all the great spiritual traditions. So I invite you to pause, breathe, and listen to what the light is telling you this solstice.

’Tis the season. A time of clarity and community, introspection and renewal. Time to recognize, appreciate, and celebrate light in darkness. Aum mani padme hum. As the Quakers remind us, “Where shalt thou seek the light if thou dost not turn within?” As the year turns, we turn with it. Such fact of life is so elemental, we often need reminding.

People in India have celebrated Diwali. Jews have celebrated the eight nights of Hanukkah. Catholics have observed the feast of Santa Lucia of Siracusa, Christian patron of Light and Sight, and soon Christians will celebrate the birth of Messiah. And in Korea, China, Japan, Vietnam and elsewhere Buddhists have observed Bodhi Day.

What is Bodhi Day? Two and a half millennia ago, a human being woke up. (That’s what budh means: to awaken.) Awakened by a tree, the Buddha looked up, saw the morning star. After years of training, in that instant, Aha!, he recognized that he and the lone star were one. That is, there is not even a razor thin slice of separation between the subject and object of consciousness. In that instant he knew in his very bones it’s a fact of life that all people have this capacity to recognize interconnection, wholeness, intimacy with life — our lives, the lives of those around us, and life itself.

So the story goes. News crews from CNN weren’t at the scene, but it’s a story many continue to tell, another of humanity’s sacred winter stories. And we tell stories because they help us grasp what’s bigger than our limited perception. In this case, the immensity is the winter solstice, and its indestructible, elemental nature. Following the long long night, Nature knows how to continue in all the right ways.

Be Still & Know

Solstice arrives on time, whether you’re paying attention or not. Solstice doesn’t depend on any calendar. It is the calendar. It is What Is, whether we will or no. A solstice isn’t any created thing. Whatever’s constructed eventually will deconstruct, like castles made of sand. Winter solstice doesn’t rely on any abstract theory behind it, nor a compelling story in front of it. Rather, it’s a most apt time to reconsider basics, and to review what stories we do tell ourselves in order to live.

Year after year, I celebrate winter solstice as an event unto itself. I can always feel it in my bones. Even within the grid of a built environment — I.E., the city. My soles and Mother Earth yearn to touch it as I walk. The birds gossip about it as they fly. I feel it calling : Pause. Breathe. Be still. Then I know: I’m living within the still point within a turning year.

Just as I’m aware there’s a pause after my in-breath and before my out-breath. So I exhale completely — as far as to the edge of the horizon. Looking deeper, I sense the silent, empty pause between exhalation and the next inhalation. Waiting for it to come, I’m like a naked hunter in the wilderness.

Dwelling in the pause I become nada. Zero. The fearful / greedy ego of my little mind drops away. What a relief! It’s not all about me. Instead, from stillness and silence, I see everything within and around me as vivid and vital. Interconnected and all in this together.

Reviewing Our Stories

Preserving the Old & Making It New

From blood or land tradition, the treasury of our winter stories of great light amidst great darkness all remind us there’s more to life than the material realm. Telling of our winter’s tale, we are unburdened and feel lighter. Light’s glow points beyond the tangible, the graspable. Our winter solstice stories seem to all tell of that light, no matter whether as flame light or star light, infinite light of ancient wisdom or the sacredness of light itself, which created our beloved eyes.

Our affinity for light continues In this pivotal time, in the swing of the great wheel of the seasons. Winter brings us up close to the greatest mystery: life, and the renewal of life. It’s a wonderful life, like they say, and is inextricably interwoven with the lives of other lives. Amazing. So, unlike spring, summer, or autumn, we exchange gifts. As Lewis Hyde explains in his classic study The Gift, the economy of gift culture predates that of commodities and consumers, and still continues in various forms as the commons.