a missed solstice
In popular Chinese Astrology the tradition is to welcome the new year in February. But this is the festival of spring and farming, not the real new year. The real new year is the moment the descending darkness (or yin) clicks into new (yang) light on the winter solstice, as imperceptibly the earth turns its face to longer days.
The Winter Solstice has always been important to me but the year I moved to Portugal, somehow, I missed it. I remember I had planned walk to a waterfall to dip my toes in the freezing water. I would have said a prayer for the new year’s light. I sometimes write things on a piece of paper and then burn it, to symbolically leave stuff behind. I wanted to open my arms to breathe in the new. I missed it all.
Huge storms swept through central Portugal, where I was living that year, and filled the rivers to overflowing, whipped trees and uprooted them, strewing them across the roads, and everywhere trembled and howled. Our electricity went down. Our internet went down (just as the festive TV schedule kicked in!). So the Christmas holiday started for us in intermittent darkness, with no contact with outside. And somehow in the chaos of trying to get reconnected, I missed my usual self-involved little ritual. But I did write this poem, which I have just found, and maybe that was enough.
No Internet
The night of the big storm,
when the internet flashed and died
we packed the fire full,
and I painted my nails in the shifting glow.
We made cauliflower cheese and stroked the cat
and agreed no internet was better,
as the wind bashed the wall,
and played our favourite songs on a phone, and sat still.
That night we floated in the betwixt and between
where breath waits
and momentum is poised,
knowing that the router’s green light would spark us again to jolt
onwards.
This link is to a much better poem, that I find very moving and makes me think of the threshold this time of year offers us all.
Happy new year, whether you celebrate the Solstice, the 31st December, or the beginning of February - somehow we all get to next year, as the earth turns!
Father Frost and the Step-daughter Ivan Bilibin