“Time passes so fast. Make time to be still.” -Lailah Gifty Akita
You need a strategy to cope with short days of light and long dark nights.
Get up and out into the light as soon as it is available. Outside light is best, but a very bright indoor light early in the day will substitute. Drink in that blue daylight like it’s love juice from the sun. It is.
Move the body. Even when you really don’t want to go outside due to bad weather, you can put on music and dance.
Eat early in the day, and stop eating for the day as early as you can. Comfort food usually isn’t, really. Unless you need extra calories because you have to work outside in the cold, a heavy diet in winter isn’t helpful. I like the idea of eating roots in the winter; soups and bakes with ginger, carrots, onions, garlic, beets, potatoes; Earth energy. The creatures and the plants withdraw into the earth at this time.
Feasting is festive though, with friends and loved ones, but for every feast, you need a fast. Keep the balance. The fast before the feast, instead of after, is better because your stomach will shrink, so then you won’t eat as much at the feast, but you will enjoy it just as much.
Remember to feed your heart too. Humans like to hunker in together in the dark times. Go visiting, go to social events, hang out with your sweetie. Call someone far away.
Just as we traditionally ate stored food from the sunnier times in the solstice season, what else have you stored from the year? Can you read your journals from the year just passing? Maybe scroll through your photos of the past twelve months?
If you can, sit by a fire. Give your no longer needed emotional debris to the fire. You can even write it down on a scrap of paper and toss it in. This is the end of a cycle, so you can go with flow and release whatever else you no longer need or want. The fireplace will take your unwanted stuff and keep you warm, clearing your aura in the process.
Light a candle. Or just “cocoon”, curl up with a book and a blanket.
This is a good time of year to center, find spirit, to just stop. In the past, the mountain passes would close, and the commerce would pause. Even today, many people get vacation around solstice. There is nothing quite as quiet as a day when the snow is so deep that the roads are impassable and the power is out due to fallen trees, but one need not go to extremes. Things generally slow down at this time so why not also pause?
In the quiet, in the stop, in the silence, feel the empty space. Nature does not abhor a vacuum, nature loves to fill one. Make a space for the new. Make some empty time for inspiration and it will come.
Hold out your open cupped hands to the possibilities. Visualize love glowing there, and you will hold in your hands a crystal ball. A bowl of the to the yet to become, the still unsprouted seed coat of what is to grow in the coming year. Then, be at peace. Cherish the moment. And wait.
Soon enough, you will feel moved from within, as surely as time marches on, as unstoppable as spring. You will be spring loaded. Before long, things will be moving at such a pace that you will fondly remember this moment and draw strength from it as you fly into the dizzy busy times you only dream of in this still dark night.
“Om is said to be a four-syllable word in Sanskrit, originally as AUM. A, the waking state. U, the dream state. M, the unconscious state. And the fourth, the silence that surrounds it—wherefrom everything arises and whereto everything inevitably returns.” -Drew Gerald
I wonder what may spring from this still moment.
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