I started to write about fairy tales and myths and legends. I started to think about how the mythical quest narrative translates into our modern lives. I wrote myself into a tangled wood, so I will come to that one another time when I’ve found the pathway through it.
So instead let me just share something more simple. This is where I am at this turning of the year in 2024.
I’m writing this bit on the Eve of the Solstice in the kind of room I once longed to own. I’m ensconced on a deep leather sofa. The walls are painted that rich deep green that I associate with LNER steam engines. The pictures around the walls are of local scenes. One wall is floor-to-ceiling dark wood book case, filled with eclectic books of the kind meant to be read, not those meant to look elegant. The books lean untidily, itching to be taken out and loved. They are worn and faded. Slightly foxed, in places. Page-turn-downs in others. The kind of books I would expect to find old notes tucked inside. There’s an unexpected Christmas tree in the corner – much more tastefully decorated than the one I have at home…that I left lit when I came away. Another wall is mostly window, opening onto a small garden where spindly winter branches lattice the sky.
I used to want a room like this, with walnut and leather and books, and lights that you have to scrunch yourself underneath, all the better to suspend your disbelief as you dive into a world of science or make-believe.
Somewhere along the line I must have learned that I can borrow rooms like this when I need them and still have the somewhat different home I created when given free rein. I could have done this at home, but I didn’t. My library / study / office / spare room / practice space has light lilac walls and lots of light, a pale sofa for lounging on but also a desk to work at. The wood is blonde.
Clearly these dark hideaways aren’t meant for my everyday. They are burrows that I need to retreat to now and then, but not somewhere I actually want to live.
On an oak coffee table, a single candle burns. Lit in remembrance of the year ending tonight. Lit in gratitude for the blessings of this year. Not least among them, the person who gifted me the candle. "This is not a birthday present," she told me. "It is sort-of an un-Christmas present." She gave it to me between my birthday and Christmas and in her own unknowing way blessed it as a Winter Solstice Candle.
She had taken the time to remember that it is this turning of the year that I mark, not the birth of a given religion’s prophet two thousand years ago, or the commercial incarnation of saturnalia, rather this simple astronomical reality that we are about to start moving away from increasing darkness back towards the growing light.
She had taken the time to try to discover what rites and rituals appertain to marking the solstice, whether it was appropriate to give gifts and, if so, of what. She found someone wise enough to tell her that the Solstice celebration is a very personal one.
There are those who will gather in stone circles and dress in unnecessary robes and attend with all “due ceremony” to welcome back the sun. And why not? It makes as much sense as others in equally unnecessary robes lighting candles at midnight in stone cathedrals to welcome the “son” as they will do in a few days time.
But I’m with the woman who sold my friend a simple white candle. It is a personal thing. And it changes over time. Past rituals can be released when they no longer speak. When ritual is continued beyond feeling meaningful, it has become dogma – and that way madness lies.
My marking of the turning of the year is informed by the year I am turning from and my hopes for the one I am turning towards.
There are no rites and the rituals, if they qualify as such, are as simple as taking some quiet time, to walk, to look at the sky, to reflect, to hope, to be grateful, to be intentional. The shape they take is fluid. It will flow into the shape of where I am and how I am, in the moment, in the light of life in the real world.
The first thing I did on lighting the candle, was to dedicate it to friendship.
This year just ending has been one of strengthening friendships and kindling new ones.
I took time to think of the moments in the year when friendship mattered. When someone came to my aid. When someone thanked me for being there. When someone made me laugh. When I was invited into a new group. When something I did touched someone. When someone remembered something we did together years ago. When someone brought me back to music and dancing. When someone made me cry by their owning of their own story. When I did the same to someone else in a different place. All the moments in the year when I have gathered with friends, women, men, individuals and groups. There are many special moments that I hope I will always remember, but even if I forget them, they were (and will remain) special. And there were many ordinary moments that I will probably forget. Those are the moments that friendships are actually based on. The ordinary ones. The conversations on the bus, in the pool, while making coffee, digging the garden, over dinner, or washing up. The moments that we forget. Until we don’t…until some years later a very specific conversation resurfaces and we see it in a new light, or simply remember it with fondness in its old one.
I spent the last daylight hours of this old year afternoon walking on the beach, trying to catch the light. The fading light, of an ending year. It was quiet. A single surfer was body-boarding waves not big enough for standing. The tide was low. The sand was luminescent in its holding of water. It was beautiful.
I remember this time last year. It was stormy and the tide was high and I was bereaved and stressed and…and today was the exact opposite of that. I have had time to read and write. I caught I train I expected to miss. I ambled on the sands and picked up stones. And the last light of the year was gently amazing.
As I write, I am drinking champagne, with freshly squeezed orange juice. I am celebrating the year that I am letting go off, because it has been a good year. It has been a year in which I feel I have settled into my purpose, and one in which I have been rewarded for doing so – in so many ways – but most importantly in the ways that it has brought me closer connection with people.
I am drinking champagne in celebration of the wonderful life I am being allowed to live – the life I am so SO grateful for.
And tomorrow…tomorrow I will be up for the sunrise…even if (as currently predicted) I will need to gear-up against the rain and imagine the light behind the clouds.
Sometimes the weather forecasts are accurate. I am writing this back on the leather couch in that dark room with the Christmas tree. My friendship candle burns anew – this time to cement those relationships into this new year – the new friends and the old ones – that we may spend many more times with each other, learning, leaning in, supporting, being supported, having fun – above all having fun which is how we lighten the load when life is heavy and hard.
I walked out in the semi-dark, down to the pier. I was not alone looking towards the east, waiting for the sun. I was reminded of the line from Masefield “and a grey dawn breaking” which made me think of my Dad. The sun did not so much rise as slink in, guiltily late, hidden behind the rain and the cloud. Even so, I took a memory of it. Even so, a young couple held up their baby son to look across the water. Even so, a surfer braved the waters, and a group of women without wetsuits wandered in to be caressed by cold saltiness. Brave women. I wasn’t one of them.
Watching for that unseen moment of the sun cresting the curve of the earth, it struck me that maybe a lot of our life’s pivot points go unseen. Unnoticed, even. It will be a couple of weeks before most people comment that the mornings are lighter, the days are longer. That change happened this morning – a little after the unseen sunrise. Our little planet has begun one more journey around its star. Wobbling as it does so, but still at more or less that angle that means (in my part of the world) that we are heading out of the darkness back into the light. This is the middle of Winter. A time for rest and stillness. A time for holding.
But also a time for noticing. Last year, my Solstice Eve was stormy (inside and out) but the morning brought an amazing sunrise. This year I was gifted evening shimmers, and paid with a morning of grey upon grey upon brown. Next year will be something else again. To me it does not matter so much how the sky is…it matters that I notice that there is sky. A shifting palette, a dramatic play of light, a softness, a dullness, an uncatchable changeling. Of all the things we talk about that give us life, water, earth, sunshine, we forget that the sky is what holds it all in. Without that narrow band of atmosphere that we call the sky, that looks so thin when seen from outside, nothing would be alive, here, now.
There is something soulful about simply bearing witness to the sky, and for me doing so by the sea at the turning of the year adds another dimension that I have no need to explain…which is just as well because I wouldn’t know where to begin.
