I've been writing posts in my head all month, and am somewhat surprised that none of them have made it online. Sorry about that! I didn't mean to take a hiatus, but I guess I did.
I had planned to write a post today about how I broke out of my holiday funk by attending a beautiful solstice ritual. It was going to be a stirring post about the power of hope, the beauty of community, and the peace of freshly fallen snow. Alas, that is not what happened, and thus I can not write that post.
I had intended to attend a ritual at sunrise Solstice morning, in which we would sing the sun up, dance a spiral dance, set intentions for the coming year, and generally have a meaningful solstice morning. In order to do this, I got out of bed at 4am, got dressed, and dragged myself out to the bus stop to catch a 5am bus. When I arrived, I checked the posted bus schedule to make sure that I was on time. With my heart in the stomach, I saw that while there is a 5am bus Monday through Saturday, on Sunday the bus doesn't start running until 6:50. The ritual started at 6:30, and I had no other way to get there. I stood at the bus stop until 5:30, just in case that schedule had been superceded and no one had bothered to change the posting, but of course that wasn't the case. At 5:30 I turned around and trudged back home.
When I got home, my husband (an absolute sweetheart) offered to hike out with me to watch the sunrise at a nearby golf course. So we went out, but of course with all the snow we were having the sky was a solid cloud cover, gray and oppressive, and there was no sunrise. The best we could hope for was a steady lightening of the gloom. I tried to feel spiritual about the experience, but it just wasn't working.
I very much regret not having gotten the release of a good solstice ritual. This is normally one of the holidays I really enjoy, but I feel just as blah and drab today as I did on Saturday. The fact that today is sunny, and the world is beautiful in it's blanket of snow does nothing to alleviate that feeling. I wish that Yule fell after the holiday season ended, so that I didn't have the weight of holiday prep bearing down on me as I try to celebrate the newborn light. Maybe I can fix that. The solstice may be an astronomical event taking place on 12/21, and I did take note of that by getting up early to watch it (or try to do so), but who says that Yule has to be celebrated on that exact same day? I could have a "real" Yule celebration after all of the family obligations are over! Perhaps I will do just that.
2 comments:
Exactly! I try to tell other people the same thing, when they say that they "missed" the solstice. It's more to me about starting off a season than the exact date of the thing. Wait til things calm down and have a Yule celebration that you can really that you can really take the time to enjoy.
I know what you mean when you say it wasn't quite fulfilling to not be able to see the sun rising. I often go to a Drumming Up the Sun gathering in the mountains, and the one year it was so grey and cloudy we couldn't tell when the sun rose, so there was no peak of anticipation or energy.
I do tend to think of the sabbats as "tides"... there are six weeks in between them, after all. So I think the energy of each sabbat lasts about that long as we flow from one to the next. There's plenty of time to celebrate!
Happy Solstice & Blessed Yule to you!
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