A Winter Solstice Love Letter

For everything there is a season.

Ecclesiastes

I usually love the week leading up to Christmas with its rituals such as the candlelit carol service at the church in which I was married, or the night out with my husband, a tradition originating from the years we always spent Christmas apart. In 2018, our son arrived on December 21st, giving this week even more significance.

Last Monday, when I learnt London was about to be placed in Tier 3, my heart sank. Of course it isn’t the end of the world, and of course the priority must be to save lives. But still, it’s been a long and relentless year, and a cocktail in a hotel bar with my husband, or a birthday brunch out with our son (who shows signs of being as much as a foodie as his mother!) were delightful sparkles to look forward to.

Tier 3 was swiftly replaced by Tier 4, and even more was washed away. Will this ever end, I asked myself as I stood on the rain-sodden ground in my local park, the sky overcast, the leaves now turned to mulch.

Today is the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. It is also described as the day on which the light returns. From now, the minutes of daylight incrementally start to build again until they reach their peak at the summer solstice. This is such a beautiful teaching: the light will always return, and sometimes it has to get very dark before it does.

Nature’s rhythms may be more structured than our own human ones. But the principle is the same: everything exists in cycles, nothing lasts forever. Dark will invariably yield to light, winter to spring, just as throughout our lives, we will roll through cycles of joy and grief, creativity and fallowness. And while each cycle may have its predominant flavour, it also holds other flavours within it, including its opposite, just as the winter solstice holds light as well as darkness.

I remind myself of this when I feel trapped, or steeped in exhaustion. None of us know when we’ll cease to live in a pandemic-stricken world. But we will, and I trust there will come a day when it’ll have faded to a distant memory, when we’ll dance again with strangers in a crowded space, or whatever it is we long to do.

While there are times to reflect upon the richness and gifts of darkness and all it can teach us, right now what’s helping me most is to anchor my attention both forwards towards the shifts that will inevitably come, and also to the present, which while challenging holds so much to be grateful for. The more closely I attune to it, the more riches I discover, be it in the stark beauty of a winter tree or the delicious warmth of a latte; sparks of light that are ever-present even in the darkness.