Photo by Elisa Stone
Perhaps
for a
moment
the typewriters will
stop clicking,
the wheels stop
rolling
the computers desist
from computing,
and a hush will fall
over the city.
For an instant, in
the stillness,
the chiming of the
celestial spheres will be heard
as earth hangs
poised
in the crystalline
darkness, and then
gracefully
tilts.
Let there be a
season
when holiness is
heard, and
the splendor of
living is revealed.
Stunned to stillness
by beauty
we remember who we
are and why we are here.
There are
inexplicable mysteries.
We are not
alone.
In the universe there
moves a Wild One
whose gestures alter
earth's axis
toward
love.
In the immense
darkness
everything spins with
joy.
The cosmos enfolds
us.
We are caught in a
web of stars,
cradled in a swaying
embrace,
rocked by the holy
night,
babes of the
universe.
Let this be the
time
we wake to
life,
like spring wakes, in
the moment
of winter
solstice
—Rebecca Parker
COMMENTARY: Today is the shortest day of the year, in the northern hemisphere; tonight, the longest night of the year. Millions will mark the solstice with celebrations honoring the celestial shift. Billions won’t. Negligent of Earth’s rhythms, the patterns of the universe, the ways our bodies naturally partner with the Earth and its non-human inhabitants—whether plant or animal—they’ll go on, preoccupied in their minds, self-absorbed and missing the Great Turning that could awaken them to the holiness and preciousness of life.
I work with death daily. As a grief counselor for a hospice agency and as a manager of programs that support the dying and those left bereft after their deaths, I walk with people plunged into what feels to them as never ending night.
People often ask me, “How can you do what you do? Isn’t it terribly depressing?”
“No,” I tell them. “It’s not. What the long night of grief can give to our lives is precious.”
I’m not unfeeling. I’m not unaware of the trauma death inflicts upon people’s bodies, minds, and souls. I’m not ignorant of the way loss strikes, often brutally, at the fragile softness of our inner lives, the way it makes us wonder who we are without the one we love, the way it makes us numb and blind to all that’s good and beautiful, the way we sometimes would rather be dead ourselves than to live without the one we love.
I’m not ignorant of all this. But my experience has taught me that darkness is more fertile than any of us can imagine, that without the night we can’t revel in the beauty of a sunrise or sunset, that without death we won’t treasure the preciousness of life, and without loss we don’t value the gifts of love.
We need these rhythms, we’re made for them, and our modern world ignores them at its peril.
So the winter solstice, a moment that’s been acknowledged and celebrated and honored by our species for tens of thousands of years, is a teacher. It reminds us that the long night holds things the bright day will never see or know. “Some want noon,” I say in a longer poem about the night, “but those who’d grow would have a night without the moon.”
This is my testimony as one who works with death and grief, and the night people often fear will never end. But it does end. Dawn comes. And when it does, we’re never the same. And there’s goodness in that even though we don’t always want or like the change.
“Winter Solstice” by Rebecca Parker is a lyrical invitation to ponder all this, a solstice summons to embrace what we can never avoid. The night comes. And with it, something holy. And beyond it comes the day.