Winter Solstice 2010

For most people the Winter Solstice is a celebration of the return of the light. While we would not want to get stuck in a pattern of short daylight and long nights I have always felt the gifts of this time of year are passed over for the attraction of a return to longer daylight.

Be that as it may, this year offers an opportunity for a combination, inside 15 hours of the same day (the 21st) for a Solstice, a Full Moon, and a lunar eclipse. The theme, as best I can describe it would be "out with the old and in with the new." Sounds like more of a New Year's thing, yes, but that's only a short time away.

At every quarter of the year there is day like our Solstice that marks the ending of a phase and begins a new one. In the Fall Equinox, when the days and nights were equal we realized we were entering the dark time of year and we tried to find agreement within ourselves about that. We looked for the gifts in the darkness, the opportunity for going inside ourselves, for finding light there as opposed to always looking outside ourselves for it. And that time of long nights, while trending toward light, will be with us for a while, so the gifts of a "fruitful darkness" will keep on giving.

However the Solstice is an ancient doorway to increased awareness, to deeper insights. Hopefully we know ourselves better because of the way we have dealt with the past three months, its challenges and opportunities to see life from a more inner place, further from the ego battle range outside. We are set to enter the energetic door of the Solstice with more openness to its potential for assisting our Soul's transformation.

Because this Solstice comes so close to the Moon's eclipse the theme of entering a new phase intensifies to that of a strong shutting down of our old ways. To add to this, the degree of the Full Moon/eclipse is 30, in Gemini and Sagittarius. This degree brings in a sense of dramatic ending, more like the rug being pulled out from under us. We are at a threshold, a culmination, we scramble to find a new form emerge from the puzzle pieces we see around us. This can be a dramatic doorway into higher initiation, a real leaving behind our past habits and patterns, the parts of us stuck in the past. Out with the stories that tell us who we are and in with the re-new-ed-self, the evolved seed, ready for sprouting from a truer, more authentic place.

Neither the chart for the Full Moon or the Solstice look like easy charts. Something I have been realizing of late is that the step we may tend to overlook in our quest to change and growth is that of loving ourselves. Perhaps it would be appropriate at this Solstice to celebrate ourselves for the life we have lived up to now, to accept that we did the best we knew how and that everything was meaningful and perfect, just the way it unfolded. From this place of self-love can begin the the joy and love that gets transmitted outward to others, to all life, and connect us to it. We could call it "Oneness" and it may be the salvation of planet Earth.

In my collage celebrating the Winter Solstice I incorporated the symbols of the season, snow falling, bare trees. I added an owl sitting on a branch in the dark, his favorite time, the time of inner wisdom. The brighter round symbol in the sky I took from the art of Carl Jung. For me it could be the Sun or a star or symbolic of a mysterious cosmos beyond our earth. It is showing us that our earthly life is only a part of something larger, and that we are both informed and inspired from there, wherever there is. The Buddha, as ever, is a symbol for me of all earthlings who aspire to the integration of the divine and the human while still in a body.

May we all find the peace that surpasses understanding. May we come through the door of self-acceptance into the light of One Love.