At work in the ruins of the year...
Longing for the halcyon days
I love it when I learn that I’ve had something bass-ackwards. I’d always thought of the ‘halcyon days’ in reference to summer and Shakespeare. But reading Charlotte Du Cann’s excellent post on Substack took me somewhere older and deeper. Back to the Greek myth of the kingfisher and the 7 halcyon days on either side of winter solstice. A time when the god of the winds stills the sea so that she may build her floating nest in peace.
Some say that we are living in a time between stories, one might even say between mythology and science. (They are both worthy and both stories.) In the gap between the dissolution and the yet to come. Transitions can be daily, seasonal and epochal. Transitions are time of great power and turbulence, chaos and choice. Your choice of story makes all the difference…
Winter solstice is one of these transitions, a magical pivot in the year. We have a modern story- it’s the first day of winter! Cultures that lived within the cycle of the seasons saw the solstice as the height of winter. The older stories speak of the descent into darkness, Persephone’s descent to the Underworld. As modern humans, we seem to find all of this quite terrifying. We cling to the story of eternal light, growth and Yang. We cling to the salad days of summer. We run screaming from darkness, death and Yin.
From a Taoist perspective, this time of year marks a period of restraint, quietude and reflection. In the dissolution of the year are found the essences of this turn around the wheel, the learnings that will be carried forward and the spark of the seeds of the year to come. True confessions- I’ve known these things at a core level for over a decade and I still struggle to source the quietude within. Around me, my patients are all frazzled, the cacophony of capitalism reaches a crescendo and there’s too much to do and too little time.
I long for the halcyon days, a quiet gap in the racket. We all long for snow days. A snow day/week that precedes and follows the solstice.
So head out into the cold dark night and find the stars. You may need to travel to do this, to find a place away from the buzz of streetlights. (I think this is part of our modern love of Christmas lights, an old yearning for the twinkling in the blackness.) I grew up in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. We could see the Milky Way in all its glory. We had a local myth that the originator of the Big Bang theory had moved to our beautiful area simply because of the clarity of our winter night sky. True or not, it was a good story.
One of the current stars in my mental constellation is Dougald Hine. He shines brightly for me currently. He often references the work of Federico Campagna who has some good questions that we could apply to the ruins of the year…
What has value and is worth carrying forward?
What are the things that you must discard at this time, but might bring back at a future time?
What are the things that just never as good as you thought?
What are the ‘dropped threads’, the golden skein glimmering in a dusty corner whose time is now?
Last night after a solstice gathering, I drove home through the quiet darkness of West Virginia. We had come together, built a sacred container, honored it and then swept it all away, leaving only cooling ashes and cracked stones. It’s quiet out in the country. Blackness punctuated by twinkling lights every few miles…the haunting peace of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols playing as I swooped up, down and around through the hills.
This year, I have learned that community can be built in a solid and powerful way by something as simple as splitting wood and dragging brush. Not by watching Netflix or playing another round of Ain’t It Awful.
I long for travel beyond the confines of plucky yet entrenched Appalachia.
I think I’ll get ahead of the twin demons of Paying for Health Insurance and No Pension therefore Living Under a Bridge by working more, but that’s not how it works.
There is no more precious thing in this world than time with those we love. (This would include all of the ten thousand beings.)
Relationship IS everything. Even with the darkness…