Since I left Massachusetts in 1987, I have only once spent the Winter Solstice in my own home, either in Indiana or in Texas. The holiday season is one of the few times I get to go back and see my family and friends in New England. So, at the cold and dark time of the year, I find myself navigating snowy highways and (inevitably delayed) airplanes, headed straight for an even colder and darker world.
Ever walk outside right after a big snowstorm, before the plows start rumbling and the sound of dozens of people digging out their internal combustion vehicles begins? Silence rules. If the storm ends at night, there is nothing but silence, black-blue sky (often with a huge star-display), and a vast expanse of white, which is tinged with pink if the moon is up and shining at a particular angle.
It is extraordinarily beautiful -- if you live in a heated house, or you are a hibernating bear. It is not so beautiful if you are homeless, or if you are a sparrow with your little feathers puffed to the max. It is the dual spirit of the Winter Solstice: death, dormant, cold and silent on the one hand, while on the other hand our local star is on the increase, and the Green Man’s return is promised in no uncertain terms.
The Earth is telling us that this should be a time of quiet, of contemplation, of sleeping later than usual, of cooking and eating the vegetables, grains and beans that were stored in the root cellar. Viewed in this way, the quiet of winter, and the resultant diminished activity, lends itself to reflection, which in turn leads to meditation on the year that has just passed; its experiences, its events, its joys and hardships, and our own actions. And, if you should want to light up a Yule log to remind you that the sun is on the increase, that’s fine too; there’s nothing like contemplating the past year curled up in front of the fireplace with the hot apple cider.
Of course, this is not what happens at all. The energy of the Winter Solstice could not be more diametrically opposed to the crazed and hectic energy that her out-of-touch humans are trying to impose on the season. We have turned the seasonal world upside down, at least here in so-called “western civilization.” Think of the travel, the hassles, the frenzied shopping, the calls, the plans, exams at the ends of semesters, the dysfunctional family gatherings – for that matter, even the happy family gatherings are hectic. We wonder why everyone is stressed, anxious, and flipped out during the Winter Solstice season; well, it makes perfect sense that we would be. We are screamin’, yellin’, and carryin’ on while Planet Earth is trying to sleep. It makes no natural, biorhythmic sense in any way whatsoever: it is the essence of the Denial of Nature.
We love to blame this Denial on post-industrial society and its frenzied consumerism, but in fact, this hyper-reaction against Nature’s quiet time is as old as humanity. The Romans had a ritual for this time of year – they called it Saturnalia. The idea was that everything would be turned upside-down: for one day, the slaves would rule, the masters would be slaves, and so on. I believe this also involved a certain amount of reckless partying. (I also suspect that if Ancient Rome had contained a Wallus-Martus Magnus, there would have been shameless consumerism as well.) Vestiges of this Roman tradition lasted well into the Middle Ages, when the same sort of role-reversal took place at the Feast of Fools (also aided and abetted by reckless partying.) In cultures all over the globe, from ancient times until the present, one can find Winter Solstice rituals that involve imbibing substances that make it feel less cold, and lighting things up and making them go Boom.
The church fathers who attempted to insert the Baby Jesus’ birthday into this mix probably knew that there was no way to stop the crazy stuff; their only prayer was to somehow attempt to tie it to something Christian. But forget dispensing with the wild celebrations -- even Cromwell and his super-Calvinist nutbars were ultimately unable to do that; they were simply outdone by the strength of the human compulsion start bonfires and administer some sort of recreational personal anesthesia when the days are too short and the wind is too cold. As the centuries progressed, the rolling snowball of Holiday Cheer gathered mass and momentum, turning the month of December into a kind of materialistic party-monster. And yet, at the heart of all this, the pervasive sense of unease remains. There is more depression, more suicide, more regret, more dysfunctional family behavior. And it’s my opinion that it happens because we are denying one half the dual nature of the Solstice: the dead, cold, silent, dormant side that we are trying to deny with our Christmas lights and our frenzied activity. To paraphrase the famous bumper sticker, “He who dies with the most toys” Still Dies -- and we don’t like it One Bit.
It was at this exact time of year, eleven years ago, that my father’s cancer – undiagnosed until it was way too late to do anything to save him – had sent him into a swift decline, while everyone jumped around having Christmas as if nothing was wrong. Apparently we were unable to all just say “Let’s screw all the presents and Christmas dinner, and just sit around quietly and enjoy each other’s company while we’re all still here,” because that would be admitting that one of us might not still be here in the near future. I was incredibly depressed and uncomfortable throughout the entire thing, and I would be dishonest if I did not admit that it has, even to this day, pretty much deep-sixed whatever lingering “holiday spirit” has not already been knocked out of me by the annual rat-race of trying to end a semester in time to buy gifts, get my house in order, find someone to take care of my animals, and hurriedly travel.
The Winter Solstice happened this year on December 22, in the wee hours of the morning (1:08 AM if you were on the U.S. east coast, 6:08 AM in Ireland, 10:08 the evening of the 21st if you were in Seattle or California.) I began this post a couple of days before the Solstice, and I am finishing it several days after. In the interim, something interesting happened to me: I became incredibly ill with a stomach virus, and effectively spent the entire Solstice period in a state of nauseated torpor, lying as still as possible in the guest room at my mother’s home. Everyone else in the house was also ill, which did away with any semblance of “holiday.” The weather was abysmal during a good part of the time – wind howling, freezing rain pelting the building. I thought a lot about the fact that I was being more or less forced by circumstance to lie completely still, and feel like Death. As I lay there I also contemplated the Tibetan Buddhist belief that illness is some kind of intense karmic purification; that you are “burning off” negative karma (or in my case, ejecting it.) I thought about the compatibility of that set of beliefs, and the whole idea of bonfires and Yule logs and yes, even the energy-wasting plethora of Christmas lights. In the monastery where my teachers live, they always have some sort of marathon practice on New Year’s Eve; either Vajrasattva, which is a great purification practice, or Tara, which is a practice said to remove obstacles. One might wish that my particular purification could have happened this year without such a literal emptying out of one’s physical contents, but … in 2007, that was my karma.
I wish I could say that all of this ruminating has brought me to some sort of huge insight, but I don’t think that it has, except to ponder this: I think that the desire to cleanse ourselves at this time of year may be as old as the bonfires. The problem is, we have no idea how to make this happen, so we keep showing up for the same movies hoping that they will end differently. Maybe this year’s presents will make us different. Maybe the dysfunctional families will get along and all the rotten old stuff will disappear like mist. When all that fails, we make goofball New Year’s Resolutions, most of which last about 48 hours if we’re lucky. We don’t really know what the hell it is we need to change, but at some deep level we know that without some process of purification, the detritus cannot be cleaned away. We know death has to happen for rebirth to happen; if the old year does not die away, the new one cannot come – but it’s hard to accept. Couldn’t it just come anyhow?
What would happen if we all asked ourselves, at each Winter Solstice: what needs to pass away now? (What – my ego? Oh…forget it; I don’t like this game. Can we just eat the cookies and play cards?) The Winter Solstice is probably a very good time for contemplation, purification, clarification, and fence-mending, and for gratitude—for the cessation of nausea, for second (and third and fourth) chances, for 3 minutes more light each day, and yet also for the darkness; and yes, also for the “death” part of the Solstice, for it’s the death part that turns the wheel and brings the “life” again. And it doesn’t matter whether your own personal mythology interprets that as reincarnation, the Resurrection, Enlightenment, cleaning all the crap out of your garage, watching the beans sprout from the compost, or knowing that the Earth will carry on after humanity’s demise – it is None of those things, and it is All of those things.
