I’m writing to wish you a blessed solstice. Winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is the ancient time for hunkering down, reflecting, and noticing what remains in the still point between days getting shorter and longer.
It’s also the natural cycle closest to the end of the year — a time to cherish and nurture the inherent goodness that always survives every diminishment, every tight squeeze, even “the dying of the light.”
We now celebrate it as members of a global community that includes dear friends in the Southern Hemisphere for whom this is the summer solstice, so it’s a different kind of time now, one in which all our cycles can be seen in a bigger context.
For me, that means knowing that every blossoming implies an eventual wilting, and that every withered flower bears seeds for a new life. It’s “all moments at once — all the time.”
This year we’re celebrating gratitude for the miracle of life, for our beautiful world, and for all our personal blessings after a year that for many of us has been filled with losses.
There are the public experiences — intensifying polarization, challenges to our democratic norms, the rise of authoritarianism — and also wildfires, record floods, super storms and an intensifying climate emergency.
And yet life is SO profoundly okay, so good, so trustable. BOTH dimensions are intensely real — and poignant.
There’s a profound richness to the vulnerable and openhearted feeling this is releasing in me now — bright with intensity, like the color magenta (the hybrid of the longest and shortest wavelength colors) or the joyous bittersweet intensity of soulful minor chords.
And it is with that feeling that I send you this solstice holiday message of appreciation and blessing.
Thank you for being a part of my life and journey.
Love,
Terry
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