artist: George Wolfe Plank
Happy Yule! I have always appreciated and been in awe of the Winter Solstice, but, unlike many dear friends, I have never actively celebrated it. With my recent affinity for gardening leading me to Herbalism (what I like to call Kitchen Witchery), I am finding myself drawn to earth-centered beliefs and Pagan rituals.
I've been wanting to have My Sweet Babboo (a.k.a. four-year-old grandson Colin) over to view my holiday decorations but, through a series of best-laid-plans-gone-awry, it just hasn't worked out yet... until now, when the plan is for me to pick him up from preschool (which I do a few times a week anyway) this afternoon, bring him to my house for a few hours, and then deliver him home to Sarah... 😍
I've been wanting to have My Sweet Babboo (a.k.a. four-year-old grandson Colin) over to view my holiday decorations but, through a series of best-laid-plans-gone-awry, it just hasn't worked out yet... until now, when the plan is for me to pick him up from preschool (which I do a few times a week anyway) this afternoon, bring him to my house for a few hours, and then deliver him home to Sarah... 😍
I cannot wait to walk him through the house, spotlighting my small lighted tree (similar to the one my Mom made in her ceramics class in the '60s)... my dining room table (with vintage ornaments in a square glass vase)... my "candle tree", with presents underneath... my Santa collection, lovingly acquired over the decades (and which I haven't displayed the last few years)... lighting candles throughout... then putting the Netflix fireplace on my TV screen and turning down the overhead lights, enjoying a snack of hot chocolate and cookies, and talking about our holiday wishes (not just which toys Santa is bringing, but of experiences and love... 💖 )
Maybe I have high expectations for those upcoming few hours but, smart and thoughtful kiddo that he is, I think he will more than live up to them. And, bonding time with my Snugglebunny: Priceless!
Maybe I have high expectations for those upcoming few hours but, smart and thoughtful kiddo that he is, I think he will more than live up to them. And, bonding time with my Snugglebunny: Priceless!
P.S. Had to share the below article, as I'm recently enamored with Ms. Renkl's writing and am, in fact, giving her book of essays to various of my special peeps this holiday season... 🎁
Ms. Renkl is a contributing [NYT] Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.
NASHVILLE — This year the winter solstice arrives on Dec. 21 in the shank of the dark afternoon. Officially the first day of astronomical winter, the solstice is better known as the shortest day of the year. I prefer to think of it as the longest night of the year, for I am making friends with darkness.
For most of my life, I looked forward to the solstice because it signals a shift to longer days. I was never a fan of winter, and earlier sunrises and later sunsets always felt to me like a kind of compensation for the cold. But my heart has been thawing these past years, watching as winter becomes ever more fragile, its cold imperiled by the changing climate, its darkness by our own foolishness and fear.
With the arrival of LED lighting, which costs so little to burn, every house has become an island of illumination, every city a blazing forest fire of artificial light. In my own backyard, it’s hard to enjoy the full moon because so many of our neighbors now leave their lights on all night long. And that’s without the holiday displays, each one bright enough to guide an airplane from the sky and land it safely in the middle of our street.
This resolve to snuff out every shadow of night — I wonder how closely it might be linked to the metaphorical darknesses of our age. Discord, suffering and sorrow are everywhere, all much darker than any winter night, and tilting Earth is not to blame for them. It’s not hard to understand what’s really to blame: Media and political figures alike profit when we are angry or afraid.
Literal darkness is simple by comparison, but people inclined to flood their own yards with light for safety’s sake seem not to know how little safety they’ve provided themselves or what measures of actual safety they have closed off in the attempt. They will never know what dangers might lurk beyond their own little circle of light because they’ve created the very circumstances that prevent their eyes from adjusting to darkness.
This is the flip side of Willy Loman’s lament about the loss of sunlight — “The grass don’t grow anymore, you can’t raise a carrot in the backyard,” he says in “Death of a Salesman.” Willy’s trouble is the proliferation of apartment houses. Ours is the proliferation of LEDs. Willy’s garden languishes, and we can no longer see in the dark.
It has become fashionable in fall for people to decorate their front porches with pumpkins of all colors and sizes. In Middle Tennessee, we don’t get more than a few days of true fall weather anymore, and no one I know grows pumpkins, so these porchscapes, as they are called, are mostly aspirational. Less fall than faux fall. An Instagram season.
But the pumpkins are real, heavy and ripe. Pumpkin season used to run right up to Thanksgiving, but Halloween now marks the end of the porchscapes. Apparently taking their cue from the big-box stores, Americans have decided to hang their Christmas lights on the day after Halloween.
It’s almost always a mistake to feed wildlife, in part because feeding habituates wild creatures to our presence. Animals that are not afraid of us tend to come to a bad end at the hands of people who are afraid of them. But I couldn’t bear to see those perfectly good pumpkins, dozens of them, heading to the landfill, so I mentioned on WhatsApp that I thought our wild neighbors would welcome a pumpkin dinner once the pumpkins were no longer useful as decorations.
My human neighbors responded by bringing me trunkloads of pumpkins. Day after day I would find our front bench piled high, and day after day I would carry the pumpkins out back and tuck them up against the fence around the play yard we built to keep our dog out of the wildlife sanctuary that is the rest of this half acre. Every morning I walk down to look at the impromptu fencescape, delighting in each new sign that a raucous feast has been unfolding in our backyard after dark.
The party has been going on for weeks now. Some of the pumpkins have been rolled across the yard, to what purpose I can’t guess. Some of the first pumpkins to arrive are beginning to rot now, but others are perfectly clean inside, gnawed down to the rind. The hollows fill up with rain, a natural water source for thirsty wildlife.
Many creatures in this part of the world will eat a pumpkin: squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, birds and turtles by day; mice, deer, opossums, skunks, raccoons, foxes and coyotes by night. Heading out to check the mail, I have watched more than one squirrel spring from the center of a giant pumpkin, rocket-launched from deep within, at the sound of my footfall.
But I don’t know who’s been feasting at night. Nearly every potential pumpkin eater in the suburbs has been spotted in this neighborhood during the 27 years we’ve lived here, and it could be any of them. It could be all of them, one after another. It would be so wonderful if it was all of them.
Which beautiful mysteries are out there in the dark, living their hidden lives so near our own unshadowed lives? I could hang our old trail camera on a nearby tree and probably find out, but so far I haven’t even charged the camera batteries. Something is holding me back, and I’m not sure what.
It might be fear. It would be a thrill to discover some rare and elusive creature delighting in these donated pumpkins, but the reverse is also true. What if I peered at all the grainy trail-cam images and found only the solitary opossum who sleeps under our shed? What if the only thing I learned from the camera is that most of my treasured backyard neighbors have been pushed out by all the changes in this changing city?
I know that’s not true, at least not yet. I can see the coyotes and the foxes with my own eyes. I see the skunks and the raccoons. Every morning Rascal heads down into his yard to sniff the pumpkins through the fence, and some mornings he leaps back in alarm at the scent of what must surely be a predator. Even so, I am afraid the day is coming when they will all be gone.
So I am teaching myself to rest in uncertainties, to revel in the secrets of darkness. I welcome the hungry creatures, cold and wild, that find their way in the dark to this unexpected bounty, but I don’t need to know who they are. Let them live out their lives in mystery. Let the cold nights hold them. Let the cold nights hold me, too.
BOOK: A Light in Life: Meditations on Impermanence by Mary Pipher
POEM: Celebration by M.E. Hope
There is a reason we save this time
of the year for celebration,
this time when we need sun or star or flame
to take us through the axis tip;
when we need snowfall and miracle
and warmth and song to carry us through
till spring. There is a reason
we search the sky, listening for wingbeat,
verse, the sound of doves hovering
in the shelter of pine. We look toward
one another, rather than away,
pull in toward the hearth
the sturdy chair, take the arms of one
so loved, we could not go on
without them, and in this
pause, we pull in the world.
The long winter night fills us:
a renewal, a radiance, a reason for waking.
QUOTE(S): "Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, beckons us into the darkness, inviting us into the depths of ourselves and asks us, “What must you let die at this time? What is calling to you to be born? What is your next step?” ~ Wild Woman Magic
"May you find peace in the promise of the solstice night, that each day forward is blessed with more light. That the cycle of nature, unbroken and true, brings faith to your soul and wellbeing to you. Rejoice in the darkness, in the silence find rest, and may the days that follow be abundantly blessed." ~ Unknown
“This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar.“ ~ Margaret Atwood
“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find, that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.“ ~ Wendell Berry
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