Daily Archives: December 21, 2013

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

At Home

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Winter Solstice                                                           Winter Moon

The long night continues.  Kate and I had our bonfire together.  All three dogs came out and sat with us for a bit before taking off for doggy business barking at something deeper in the woods.

(Lorraine_Williams_Rainbow_Serpent_Dreaming)

The silence has fallen and will stay with us until morning.  Then the sunlight will wake up the birds and the newspaper deliverers and those who work on Sunday mornings.  And the long trek into darkness begun last summer in June trades places with an equally long ancientrail of light.

These are not opposites, not poles of a dialectic, but two sides of the world, entered through dawn and twilight, and with us every single day of our lives.  I’m still intrigued with the notion that the darkness may be our brains normal state and all this waking activity is clever misdirection by the dreamtime.

This will bear more thought and reading.

I do know this.  The ancientrail of darkness is katabatic, like Persephone’s or Orpheus’s or Odysseus’s.  That is, it is the trail which leads to the underworld, the dark places within us and that it has always drawn me more than the journey toward the light.

Let me say exactly what I mean here.  This is a bodily sensation, a sense of familiarity and comfort, a feeling of spirituality and it correlates to the increasing darkness.  It becomes most intimate this night, a night that is different from all other nights. Yet, the same.

It’s not that I reject the light or feel oppressed by it.  The garden, the growth of plants and the chance to wander outside easily has its joys, certainly.  It’s just that for me the darkness is richer, takes me further.

Does this have any correlation to my depressive or melancholic or dysthymic states? Maybe.  Does that mean it’s bad in some way or counter productive?  I don’t think so.  It seems to me that this is descriptive, not prescriptive or proscriptive.

My guess is that our bodies and our early life experiences give us a tendency to lean more toward the dark or the light.  My guess further is that since waking activity has a natural though not necessary linkage with the day, in particular work and school, that we privilege those who tend more toward the light, perhaps even suppressing in ourselves a tendency to favor the dark.

At any rate I’m of the dark persuasion and this is the moment in the year when I feel, as Tom Crane suggested, at home.

 

 

Great Wheel

Winter Solstice 2013

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Winter Solstice                                                                    Winter Moon

It’s here!  It’s here!  No.  Not Christmas.  The Winter Solstice.  It’s my favorite holiday of the year and one I anticipate with eagerness.  We hit the solstice moment at 11:11 am here, the time when the tilt of the earth begins to move ever so slightly back toward the sun, a move that, at the end of the next six months will once again light up midsummer.

A friend, Tom Crane, has an interesting take on the Winter Solstice.  He sees it as a form of the story of the prodigal son.  For him we return “home” each year to this spot, this fulcrum between light and dark, and receive a glorious welcome from what he refers to as our high-self.  The high-self bids us come inside for a feast.  At this feast, Tom goes on, we dine on the fatted calf of our own gathered treasures.

Yes.  A recurring feast in which we invite our multi-form selves to dine on the wonders of which we have become aware in our own home.  This is a life-affirming read of the Winter Solstice, one that takes the eternal return and gives it a personal meaning.  More.  The personal meaning it gives acknowledges the positive accomplishments within, not the material achievements without which carry their own reward.

And, let me add a bit.  An important transition for me has been metaphysical.  That is, I began a long while ago to push away spirituality based on the transcendent and sought it in immanence. That’s a move away from God above and without to incarnation.

In this incarnational understanding spirituality comes from within us and from the world around us.  So, patching together the recurrent astronomical event, the Winter Solstice, with the notion of the high-self inviting us to dine on our own gathered treasure, is a ritual acknowledgment of the move from transcendence to incarnation.

And such an understanding is not without precedence.  The Christmas story is, too, an incarnational story, the story of the divine found and acknowledged in one just like you and me.  It is such a story pegged in recurrence to the Winter Solstice.  At this level of understanding I celebrate Christmas, too.  Of course, the Christian version links the divine within to a high god without who has to validate our divinity, then save us when we deviate from it.  That seems unnecessary at least.

The high-self (I like that formulation.) is the sacred within us and it always invites us to celebrate the richness that we are.  We are our own Three Kings, magi–that is invokers of magic, who bring the gifts that we then offer to the world.

So this long solstice night I invite you to go down and in, find the inner sanctuary and within it, the inner banquet table, and sit down to a feast of the very best that you are and that you have to offer the world.  The high-self welcomes you home.