From Darkness into Light – Finding Reason in the Season
By CYNTHIA WALLENTINE
It is the midnight of the year – a moment out of time that is not before or after, but merely, and permanently, present.
The winter solstice at 9:30 PM PST on December 21 is an astronomical event when we are as far, in tilt and time, from the star we orbit as we will ever be.
In the universe known to us, we are the only creatures who make meaning – and of this astronomical event our species has made great meaning.
From eons of divine figures born in the winter festival season to the New Year of western Europeans – the short days and long nights, the darkness and the quiet turning of the solstice moment deliver great light.
Noise, beauty, sorrow, arguments, pollution, love. Humans cannot resist giving form and hence meaning to so much. In the solstice we find light, goddesses giving birth to gods, creativity finding expression.
From the frozen ground to the greening spring, the new supplants the old in the eternal duel of the Holly and the Oak Kings. And in our own nature, humans find reason in this season to lend compassion to those less fortunate, and proffer gifts to those we love.
Throughout the year and throughout our lives, the meaning we ascribe to things, events, and people nurtures, teaches, titillates, even kills. We are born to receive, hold, transform, and on death – release – meaning back into the world, the universe wherein we lived.
There is a theory that ours is an infinite universe, that the shape of all we know and do not know is flat and extends without end. Understanding infinity is difficult, imagining endlessness is not.
For if our universe is endless, so then are we, defined only by ourselves, confined only by the choice we don’t dare, the thoughts we will not, or cannot, admit.
That which is endless is never alone, that which has light can never be completely dark.
As midnight turns to morn, let conditioned give way to unconditional. For the solstice moment and in this season, stand free.
Meaning made by humans can be unmade too, turned and transformed from dark into light. The past haunts, the future beckons, but you right now, are likely forever. Peace, light, and warmth to you in this solstice season.
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