It’s December in Maine, and I know people who hate this time
of year, people who struggle with the darkness. People who utter a quiet little
curse at the summer solstice when the days start to get imperceptibly shorter,
and wail and gnash their teeth out loud at the fall equinox when the balance
tips in favor of the night. For them the winter solstice means hitting rock
bottom, with only the faintest brightness that from here on out for the next 6
months, the days start getting longer.
I have to admit publically, and I may lose some friends for
this, that I love this time of year. I love waking up in the dark, and
burrowing in to home and hearth in the late afternoon. I love the long nights
and late mornings. The pace of modern life is so mismatched to the natural
seasonal rhythms here at the 44th parallel, we rush off to work in
the morning, stay until late afternoon, come home after sun down. Of course the
long nights and short days feel untenable. But if you can give your self the
mental space to touch base with your inner self, call it your ancestral self, I
think you will find, as I have, that these long nights serve a purpose. Your
body knows what it is.
As the days grow shorter in the late fall, I have a harder
time going out to run. I start thinking about yoga instead, and I restart my
meditation practice. I stop eating salad, and instead roast root vegetables by
the pan full. I do this because it is what feels right, because I trust the
ancestral knowledge in my cells, because my body evolved with seasonal
patterns, and the past 150 years of human evolution (or lack thereof) hasn’t
erased them.
If you look around the natural world for cues this time of
year, every one of them will tell you to settle down, to rest up, to wait.
Deciduous trees draw their sap down underground and wait out dry and the cold
of winter. Many mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects spend this time in a
state of suspended animation, living off the bounty of summer, waiting for the
next productive season to come. In learning to embrace winter I do not suggest
truly hibernating, or hardening yourself against the cold; instead use this
time as a resource. Nature bids us inside, and provides us with quiet. Take these
moments to rest your self and let your mind settle, these moments are fleeting
and rare in our modern lives. One of the reasons we find the holidays so
stressful is that we’ve let them become a time of arousal and glitter, parties
and over indulgence instead of reflection. Everyone I know who celebrates
Christmas tells me the same story; their favorite thing is to sit quietly in
their living room looking at the lit up Christmas tree, the rest of the lights
off, families asleep. Silent night indeed. We are seeds, waiting in the frozen soil, we
are chipmunks resting in our burrows, we are chickadees flying at day break, we
are wood frogs frozen in the leaf litter, we are white tailed deer yarding up
in a cedar swamp, we are humans negotiating an increasingly complex world here
half way between the equator and the pole.
We’re coming up fast on the Winter Solstice, the moment when
the Earth’s axis of rotation points us in the northern hemisphere as directly
away from the sun as possible. It will be another 6 weeks or so before we
notice that the days are getting longer, at about that time the plants will
start to notice too. In the mean time, stoke up the fire, turn off the lights
and plug in your Christmas tree, or light a candle or look out at the stars and
the moon. Take this dark time for what it is, a gift not a curse. Happy
solstice everyone.
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