At three in the afternoon on December 21, I find myself walking around the house in a kind of panic. Sunset is a critical time event. It cannot be negotiated or delayed. He doesn’t care that it’s a busy, impossible time of year, full of loud demands. The sun will set exactly at what, according to the weather app on my phone, is 3:50 p.m. That’s just under eight hours after it rose this morning. No wonder the days feel so dark.
I’ve been running like this for a while now. I don’t know exactly when it started, and I never wanted it to start at all, but there it is, every year, that slow buildup of intensity in the run up to Christmas. There are the gifts to be bought, the plans to be made, the cards to be written and sent (or, in my case, bought, tinkered with, and then left in their packages). There’s the food that needs to be made early and put away, a list that gets longer every year: chutneys and pickles in the fall, a Christmas cake and pudding, biscotti, Swiss leckerli, damson gin. There are the people who arrive with unexpected gifts that send you into a fight to reciprocate. It all starts to feel a lot like hard work.
I run through the narrow Victorian streets of Whitstable towards the sea. My breath is high in my chest. Is this extra layer of rush and stress worth it on top of so many others? I lift my basket in front of me to slide down one alley, then another, and then climb over the boardwalk and here, finally, on the beach. The sun is already low and I’m not sure if there’s time for the fire to get going before the light disappears completely.
I make a circle of logs below the tide line, fill it with wadded up newspaper and sticks of firewood, then strike a match and watch the flame catch, spread and grow, buoyed by the gentle breeze that comes from the sea . I swing another log on top, and now friends are arriving, creaking up the beach towards me, carrying folding chairs and jars, Tupperwares and blankets. The sun is a few centimeters from the horizon. We send the kids off to fetch more firewood from the shore, and I pour them all a drink in my tin cups, realizing that the fire has really taken this year. It’s an orange roar against the pale sand.
I straighten up, take a sip of my drink, and do the kind of involuntary exhalation that comes when you finally relax in spite of yourself, because everything is as it should be, as it always has been.
*
The winter solstice is often seen as the axis on which the year turns, the shortest day followed by the longest night, after which the days lengthen again. Except that’s not entirely correct. The solstice is best understood as a lull in the darkest part of the year. Our ancestors, who lived in the absence of clock time, watched the sun stand still in the sky for several days, rising and setting at its southernmost position. This original meaning is revealed in the Latin etymology of the word solstice: sol stit. The sun has stopped. He has ceased his wandering through the sky.
The sun stands still at the height of summer’s rush and the unsettling depths of winter’s darkness, and we know those moments have always felt meaningful. Throughout the ancient world, temples, cities, and stone formations aligned with the solstices, though their exact meanings have been lost to time. I have heard that the ancient rites of the winter solstice were an attempt to relight the sun, to set it in motion like a stationary car. Maybe, but I doubt there was ever a time when humans didn’t know that the sun would restart its journey. Knowledge has always been continuous, passed between us, intrinsic to our humanity. We know that the winter solstice will pass. We know that it is, in fact, fleeting. But each year, we must wrestle with the irrational part of ourselves that tells us it isn’t.
The holiday season is now associated with rushing and exhaustion, with laziness and boredom, with a restless, purposeless kind of stagnation, and a driving pressure to produce and buy. It seems like an absurd amount of effort for just one day, but we do it anyway, discussing as we go. It is possible, I believe, to change this, to reestablish our connection to the break of the year, and to learn to embark on the journey it offers us. To do this, we must go back to an older understanding of this moment: the long winter. We know of the Yule of northern Europe, of the Slavic days of Koliada, of the Twelve Days of Christmas, not one. It is not a preparation for a single day followed by a season of atonement, but a time between times, this season within a season. Midwinter is a process, not an event; it is a lived experience. When we make room for it, we allow ourselves to change.
We can learn to fill the long solstice with a variety of beautiful things: with many soft parties instead of one overwhelming one, with family gatherings and bright parties, with gift exchanges and sung songs. But it is also a place for stillness to arise in us, a time for solitude and contemplation, for long walks in the fresh air and time spent leafing through books and writing in journals. In Celtic lore, these are the ‘omen days’, a time to divine the coming year. There is a melding going on in all that darkness, a connection made between us and the night, a place where dreams seep into our wakefulness.
The sun stands still to make time for us to reconnect with the people we love, to reflect on the old year and imagine the new. In the ten days between the solstice and the new year, we can let the winter solstice inhabit us. When the days are clearer again, we will be changed.
*
The sun touches the horizon and black-headed gulls take to the air, screeching against the impending darkness. We say that we are glad to be here again, that we have waited for this, for the peace it brings. It landed without my noticing, that sense of satisfaction that this is exactly the right thing to do right now, that there’s no better place to be. Nothing really here: a fire, some talk, a cold beach, and a sun that is visibly sinking, a red sliver sinking and sinking until there is nothing left but its glow in the shadowy sky. .
“I guess that’s it,” I say. “We have completed the year!” It’s a phrase I learned a few years ago, when I celebrated the solstice at Stonehenge, and I love the way it suggests it was our job, rather than the sun. We clink our cups and call out to the children so we can hug them. The fire looks a little brighter. Now that the sun is gone, it feels like we’ve captured it here on the beach, burning at our feet.
This is the seeding of a space that will expand and take on a life of its own over the next twelve days. It will have a quality of its own, this place where we gather to experience the time of stasis, when our world collapses in on itself for a while, and all rules are suspended. It is a place where I know I will find peace.
Katherine May is an internationally best-selling author and podcaster based in Whitstable, UK. She is the author of the hybrid memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, as well as The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, and other works. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and Aeon. May hosts the podcast, The Wintering Sessions. Her next book, Enchantment, will be published in 2023.
Editor’s Question: How do you envision yourself embracing the long solstice? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below!
Source: news.google.com