Winter Solstice at the Crossroads
by guest writer Adam Murray
This year I see the winter solstice as a crossroads. No surprise, because I had a powerful crossroads vision several months ago and now I see them everywhere.
Four roads meet at my crossroads, each path overseen by its own deity. Trickster god Eshu rules the crossroads, and in my vision he also controls one of four ways out. I have chosen to set up camp here, though, straining against my instinct to keep moving.
Histories of winter solstice traditions speak mostly of celebrating the return of light. To some Indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, it is “the day the sun turns around,” marked by feasts and celebration. The Germanic and Nordic Yule log represents the Sun’s reliable triumph over winter starting on the solstice. Dongzhi marks the same victory, as does Willkakuti in parts of South America, Yaldā night in Iran, India’s festival of Lohri, Inti Raymi in Peru, and the Mãori Matariki, celebrating the constellation we call Pleiades, which turned the Mãori sun back from winter after leading spirits of the dead up from the underworld. Many refer to Jesus as “the light of the world,” theoretically born, as luck would have it, very near winter solstice. Throughout time and geography, light has always been the lowest hanging fruit of worship, honored every winter solstice, apparently almost everywhere.
Far fewer traditions celebrate winter solstice for its most significant attribute: darkness. Such a sinister motive animates secret witching realms and pagan traditions like Samhain. Post- modern folk in the so-called “new age” embrace the darkness for various reasons, although most often as a necessary companion to … light, which is always reborn from the inky blindness of dark.
I get all of that. It is natural and fantastically human to turn from the darkest hour toward the light. Every solstice is a portal between two worlds. One, a regret-scarred past riddled with grief and a terrible sense of unfinished business; another anticipates a future brimming with golden sunshine, good fortune, and above all, hope. How could we not turn?
Despite all those homo-sapienisms, I think something very different is happening on winter solstice. As the earth’s tilt hits its apex, the sun’s path across the sky appears nearly identical for several days. In Latin, solstice means sun stops. It is getting neither lighter nor darker. All earth dwellers except for those that live deep beneath the sea mark the passage of time by reference to the sun. Our bodies, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral, know when to shut down or rise because the sun informs them. The sun feeds everything that produces energy on this planet. We must adjust our habits to it, grow the leaves of our branches toward it, because those are nature’s unbreakable laws: night always falls and day always breaks. This pause, when the sun stops, is not a moment marking the switch from one season to another. It is a much longer transition that calls us to honor the importance of stillness and silence.
In my monkey brain, after years of uncertainty, it finally feels like COVID doesn’t really stop anything except the people we lost to it. But then more uncertainty, after nearly 77 million fellow citizens ratified American oligarchy. The gruesome frenzy of holidays is feasting on my winter chill. My carefully charted course through this life suddenly feels more like the Hockney collage above than the vision of clarity I sought: cubism, with its confounding erasure of what I formerly considered reasonable expectations.
So here we are at the crossroads, again. What path will you choose? How quickly can I escape? Where are we going, and how long until we get there?
But what else might happen if you pause at this crossroads instead of lunging toward the next thing? What if I camp here, poised between receding darkness and blistering light? Can we dial back the volume on what we think is happening, or about to happen, and tune into what our eyes actually see and our bodies actually feel?
Where two roads diverge in the woods, the path least travelled by is to stand still. Do not go gentle into that good night, nor rage, rage against the dying of the light. Simply be still in that liminal space, at home in your rightful place, a child of earth forever tethered to the sun’s and the moon’s circular pace.
On this winter solstice, let’s not celebrate a battle between dark and light, but embrace the stillness where both coexist, at the crossroads.