Some solstice notes…
* Imagine yourself inside of a completely trashed house. You’re having one of those moments where you come to grips with the amount of work it will take to get this house back in shape. Before you start in, you sit down on some random piece of the rubble, maybe a box full of old books whose time is up. As you sit, you crack open a beer, or maybe pour yourself a glass of wine, and you toast to the humor of the situation…the despair and hopelessness have reached their limit, and so you raise your glass to them. “Nice show, 2016,” you say, “you salty bastard.” And before you get to work, you spend time with the ghosts in the mess. You honor them and like Ebeneezer Scrooge growing more pliable through the night, you listen to their cryptic messages…you see their omens and signs strewn through the clutter before you. What began with laughing and resignation may slowly turn the corner into some reluctant tears. And though you’re not going to get to work on this problem just yet, though you’ll have to come back to this scene and get to work again soon enough, for tonight you’re going to celebrate and honor what’s happened, even though it was difficult. So for now you pick up one particular box of trash, something manageable, and you bring it with you on your way out…a promise to yourself that you will return, with good spirits, with renewed faith and dedication, to begin again and get your house in order.
* Or, imagine that you are at the ground level of something beautiful, something inspiring, something that you know will require all of your dedication, persistence, and hard work in the year ahead. “I’m not going to screw this up,” you say to yourself. “I can do this.” But before you get going on building on this foundation, you spend time toasting the stars and imagining and visualizing all that you are promising to yourself. And deep down inside a voice says to you, “Even if you fail, you have to try. If you fail, you’ll do so with love in your heart.” An excitement is growing like a bright fire at the foot of a cold winter mountain.
* As Mercury is retrograde at this solstice moment, in conjunction with Pluto, you may be feeling like you can see something rather ominous coming down the road that others cannot. You may feel alone in this wisdom or predictive insight, and because you have love in your heart, and because you walk the path of humbleness, you know it’s not your place to try to correct, condemn, or point out the error of someone’s ways. It’s not your place to play prophet, and it’s not your place to withhold anything, or say “I told you so,” even when what you see coming will in fact happen. This place of lonely wisdom amidst friends, family, and ancestors is often a place of secret sadness. But it’s also something else, something far more special and important. In the darkness of the ignorance around you, your lonely wisdom, your humble insight into the future, is a candle. And the great joy that we look forward to in times like these is not that someday people will recognize that it has been us holding the candle all along, but rather that the light itself has been there all along, and will always be there. So don’t let your wisdom be the source of your sadness or your loneliness this holiday season. Instead, let it be the source of your joy, your trust, your generosity, your happiness, your peacefulness, your forgiveness, your patience and modesty, and your good cheer. So long as we are ever holding this little light of wisdom, we are blessed with all we could possibly ask for.
Prayer: Teach us the joy of the secret light and wisdom we hold in the midst of any surrounding darkness.
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