Winter                                                   Moon of the Winter Solstice

I know the usual thing is to focus on the victory of the sun, the gradual return of the light that begins after this evening. That’s why we have all the brave festivals of the light in the month or so leading up to the Winter Solstice. They are ritual pleas for just that victory. We need the sun for sustenance and can never afford its absence. The darkness, both in a nightly sense and especially in a foreboding, possibly apocalyptic sense grips us at a primal level, the darkness of the grave.

Still. The Winter Solstice is my favorite holiday for the opposite reason. It represents the zenith of darkness in the solar year and I love it for that. I take it as the delivery on the promissory note given on September 29th, Michaelmas. Michaelmas as I’ve noted here before is, according to Rudolf Steiner (as flagged now long ago by friend Tom Crane), the spring time of the soul. The Winter Solstice is the soul’s midsummer, the time when  seeds planted in the soul during late summer and early fall have taken root and begun to flourish.

Take time on this, the longest night, to wonder. Take time to weed your soul’s garden, pulling out and discarding pointless tasks, burdens taken on that no longer make sense. You also weed by asking for forgiveness, by making amends. For your ideas to flourish you need a mental space as unburdened as possible by the mistakes and missteps of the past.

Encourage yourself in the quiet of the solstice night. Go back through the last few months and find those things that you’ve done well. Note them. Think of good deeds, selfless deeds you’ve done. Remember what in you made them possible. This night is for you, a time to recollect and reinforce.

Take time with yourself and be happy you exist. I actually saw just this phrase, be happy you exist, on a Roman grave marker in Constanta, Romania.