Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
The holidays. Important for personal reflection, even have the ability to transform a life as we lay our lives alongside the possibilities suggested by Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, the Winter Solstice, New Years. Birthdays, anniversaries, too, can reach into the deep part of your self, we can call it soul, and help you see yourself in the other. Maybe, they let you see in there, too. Holidays are a time out of time, a break in the straight ahead, up and at’em busyness of career, family, school.
There is, though, a dark side to the holidays. All moments of possibility contain paths that lead not to transformation but to destruction, temptation, agony and pain. The dark paths often emerge when the vulnerability and self-intimacy of the holiday intersects old ways of being, often ways learned in family settings, banished most of the year; but, as family and holiday conjoin, the vulnerability allows the past to rise quickly, to overwhelm.
This is as the Tao teaches us. Even the dark side of the holidays offers a chance to become new, a chance to take the past and place it in a new frame, a way of understanding that puts the past in its own place and leaves the future open, perhaps even better for the relocation.
Darkness is not, in itself, bad. Nor is light, in itself, good. Too much light prevents our ability to see. “Light is the enemy of art,” as the curator of the Thaw wing of the Fenimore museum said. Darkness nurtures and heals, is a time for sleep, for seeds to germinate. The holidays bring a special charge to the light and the darkness in our lives. Our task is to open ourselves to what each has to offer us; to take it in and accept the possibilities.