Stillness and the Birth of the Light

Two Special Solstice Classes

"[...] I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder"​
- Lawrence Ferlighettti

Time and history can seem unrelenting. At one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century, watching Fascism seem ascendant and triumphant, the Jewish mystic, Walter Benjamin, wrote of his vision of the Angel of History:

"a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. "
I have been reflecting on this passage a great deal lately – and wondering how we can change the course of such a storm. And as I so often do, I find the beginning of an answer in understandings of time that come from before this civilization: we begin by stopping and being still.

As the late Father Daniel Berrigan would sometimes say: Don't just do something. Sit there.

Before calendars marked a linear progression of time, people lived by the cycles of the life of the land and the cycles of the sun, moon, and stars. And in the solar cycle of the year, Solstices were important liminal times.

When we think of the Solstices, we think mostly about the balance of dark and light. But at their root, the words for Solstices in both English and Irish (Grianstad) are about stillness. A Solstice is a time around which, for several day, the sun appears to stand still in its movement across the horizon at dawn for four days.

In the middle of that time in Winter, the longest night comes. But in the cosmology of my Irish ancestors, all things begin in darkness.

And in a still, dark place, in a burial chamber older than the pyramids, near the mouth of the river that mirrors the Milky Way, on those four mornings around the Winter Solstice, at dawn, a single shaft of sunlight illuminates a triple spiral, revealing the mystery of life, death, and rebirth.

The old stories say that it was in that chamber on a single night that magically became a year, against all odds, one who would become an embodiment of love was conceived, gestated, and born. And we have only recently learned that conception indeed begins with a flash of light in the darkness.

To know these things, to understand these things, we must become very still.

So I wish you the blessing of stillness this Solstice that we all might become quiet enough to witness a rebirth of wonder. And I invite you to join me for two special classes:

On Sunday, December 17, at 7:00 pm EST, we will be exploring plants like Passionflower and Mistletoe that can help us enter into stillness -- register at https://otherworldwell.com/blogs/news/be-still-and-know

On Wednesday, December 20, at 6:00 EST we will look at the stories of two mythic figures born at Brú na Bóinne on the Winter Solstice, and what they can tell us about hope and transformation -- register at https://otherworldwell.com/blogs/news/the-dark-night-and-the-birth-of-the-light

All who register will have 30 day access to recordings of the classes they register for.

photo from Wikimedia Commons