I’ve set this post to pop at exact Solstice Time: 10:35 Pacific. I haven’t done a DITL post in a long time. (DITL is my shorthand for "Day in the Life Of A Post-Modern Priestess", one of the Categories here at Sage Wisdom)
(Picture at left is the Winter Solstice sun at dawn, shining through the keyhole entrance to the barrow hill at Newgrange, Ireland where priests and priestesses of the ancient religion observed the march of days)
At this time of year pre-2000, I rose before dawn and climbed a mountain to see the sun up with a group of pagan-identified friends who all sang Solstice songs and Wassailing carols. We would sing until the sun was quite golden and we could distinguish individual grass blades. The sun hitting the grass and melting the frost was our sign that our Solstice duty of seeing the sun on the shortest day, after the longest night of the year, was complete.
My shamanic mentor, d., taught that in one hemisphere of the world a shaman sings up the sun every morning, and in the opposite hemisphere, totally unbeknownst to each other, another shaman in a completely different culture sings the sun to bed each night. They must do this or the sun will not rise. Yet they do so in complete isolation from one another. Perhaps d. mused, they met in the dreamtime and coordinated the effort. Who can say? Does the sun rise only because these two dedicants are ceaselessly at their work? As long as they continue, one cannot say to the contrary.
I was also thinking about how we can only know a thing by its polar opposite. War teaches us about peace and vice versa. We don’t really know what dark is without light to define it. Even the ancients knew when the year turned by measuring the longest night against the daylight hours. From Solstice time forward, the light increases, which brought many blessings to ancient agrarian folk as it does to us today.
Limned by the piercing rays of early morning sun, our lives stand out in a series of stark contrasts at Solstice. "It’s later than you think", chime the rays of Solstice dawn. "The year is at an end, Spring comes anon. Haste! Make ready! Make ready the Day!"
What do you have to make ready? To finish and have done before the new year dawns? Ponder well and welcome in the Day…
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Taking the ups and downs too literally
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