Winter Solstice, 2024

We come to the longest night of the year. The dark lengthens, the light shifts. I awaken resolved to spend it in solitude and silence. There are plenty of opportunities for celebrating with others. I have them all sketched in my calendar….sunrise tea ceremony, sweat lodge, prayer vigils, fire circles.

Instead, after a “peopled” week, I leave behind all these wonderful gatherings and come home to my own soul’s expansiveness. A place I often don’t visit for more than 20 minutes a day. Winter Solstice, for me, is always the threshold to the holiday march towards the new year. In this season of darkness and lights, I want to be in reflection. To feel my anticipation, my trepidation and some undefined deep dread as we inch towards 2025. I want to face my grief over the ongoing slaughterhouse of war zones, and how this country fuels them with U.S. made weapons. I am willing finally to slow down to a complete stop and see those faces of children and elders and families terrorized and killed. To sit shiva with them. To pay attention to my own longings, hopes and dreams, as well as those small circular arguments that run loops in my head and petty anxieties that crop up like fleas. Time spent with the Soul is a way to make peace with all that lives inside my head and heart.

I slowly, deliberately chisel my cacao into a pot, sweeten it with honey, watch it melt into the water and soymilk—the oils of the plant rise to the surface. I begin with a steaming cup on this chilly morning. It has become a ritual for me, a way to face the day with a peaceful joy. I remember the hands that have lovingly grown and prepared these round discs of chocolate in the far away forests of Mayan villages.

The earth calls me to come and set awhile with her as I look out across the filigreed branches of the aspen, the white frosted and crystalized landscape, the icy ponds, and rising sun.

Soul Time is going to be of essence in these coming years, especially in a time of climate emergency—as our forests burn, our cities are flooded, humans migrate from the carnage on their land, since we can no longer drink our water, breathe our air or eat healthy food from despoiled land.  The human community will need each other more than ever. Our communities must become circles of prayer, open hearted welcome and sharing as we prepare for the future now. The assault is surely to come with the new “elite” administration, intent on opening up for extractive development and leveraging, every wild place or untouched piece of land for their own monied purposes. 

For those who love the Creation and the animating life force of the Creator in all that lives and breathes and has being, the place of our deepest desolation will also be the place of solace. The natural world will give all of us the love and courage we need. As Robin Wall Kimmerer, the beloved Potawatomi Nation writer and botanist says, in her field book for returning to right relationship with the earth,  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants….

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Be ready to protect our lands here in New Mexico and everywhere. Do it with every ounce of your love and being for our precious food, water and air and this umbilical cord of life that sustains us.

Blessed be.

Taos, New Mexico, December 21, 2024

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