Join me on the eve of the Winter Solstice for an invitation to gentle solstice ritual, poetry, meditation and nourishing somatic enquiry to ease us into the season of deep rest.
Now is the moment of magic, when the whole, round earth turns again toward the sun…
Victoria Safford
The Winter Solstice is a time of special blessing. The invitation to stillness often gets forgotten amid the other great Winter celebrations. Here is your invitation – whatever your personal spiritual beliefs. This is a gentle participatory workshop with a quiet and personal solstice ritual, inspiring seasonal poetry, meditation, gentle somatic enquiry and – to round off the evening – a delicious singing bowl relaxation.
What you need to attend: – a comfortable, warm space, warm comfy clothes, a notebook and something to write with, and maybe a warm drink – and that’s it! You can be on the sofa, on the floor, in a chair, on the bed. Just be comfy.
I am an ordained interfaith minister and spiritual counsellor with many years’ of practice in leading and conducting ritual, as well as 20+ years teaching yoga and meditation.
Blimey. It’s been a while. To be fair, I have been writing a dissertation, doing an actual ‘proper’ job, and hosting a podcast. These all require a significant amount of neurodivergent/creative bandwith. All good, creative, purposeful things.
photo taken while I was still feeling hopeful!
Into the mix, however, is a broken collarbone which has YET TO BE FIXED because of two (two!!) cancelled surgeries. The first one was cancelled when I was in the hospital, already wearing the surgical gown and DVT socks, and with an arrow sharpied onto my left shoulder. This might have been hilarious if it wasn’t after six months of waiting. Then there was the 18 hours of fasting and working myself up into enough of a lather to actually be able to go to the hospital in the first place! What is everyday to the people who fix collarbones, is a really big deal to those of us who need them fixed. And some of us have brains that don’t do these sorts of things very easily.
The second cancellation – just this Monday past – rather tipped me over the edge. Today is Wednesday. I am still over the edge. And since I am already over the edge, why don’t we add having no running water into the joyful blend of Solstice cheer and Christmas preparations? Yes, why not?
Let them drink… sweet sherry and prosecco!
The thing is… these things are happening to me, and I could – quite legitimately – feel personally aggrieved. Which, I do. But I am utterly, seethingly livid about the bigger picture. Yes, it’s personal, but the personal – as my feminist forebears taught us – is political.
Friends, let me present to you: The English health service. And the English water network.
The NHS because of – God – where do we even start? Yes, I am anxious and stressed and still in pain because my operation got cancelled. But it got cancelled because staff called in sick. There is not even a nanometre of leeway in the NHS to accommodate that. Chronic staff shortages, underfunding, Brexit, and a (Not even very covert) push towards privatisation have all taken a massive toll. It is on its knees. And people wonder why nurses are striking?
Not even the USA has private water, that’s how bad it is!
And the water! My God the water. England and Wales have a privatised water supply and networks. This is monopolized (quite legally btw) by a few companies who fail to invest in infrastructure so that rainfall causes flooding, burst water mains cause havoc (and NO RUNNING WATER FOR CHRISTMAS) and raw sewage is constantly released into our rivers and seas!
If I am pissed off about my own personal circumstances, it pales in comparison to the level of seething rage I feel at the immoral erosion of these two fundamental basic human rights.
Things really are a bit crap. Let’s not pretend they’re not.
And tonight is the Solstice, and I came on here to write something spiritual and hopeful and, well here it is! We can laugh about that surely? There comes a point – when everything is just a bit shite – when all there is left to do is acknowledge it, maybe indulge in a bit of dark humour, and surrender all and any control we imagined we had. This does not mean giving up the fight, only that there are fighting days, and there are surrendering days. There are times for rolling up our sleeves and doing everything we can to make things better, and there are times for filling a hot water bottle (perhaps with boiled rainwater!) and hiding under a blanket.
So into this longest, darkest night of the year, I offer this meditation:
Everything is a little bit shite, and that’s OK. Joy and Peace and Love and Hope still exist.
And a Blessing:
May you feel the deep Peace of Winter’s stillness; the cocoon of Love that surrounds you in the darkness; the joy that bubbles up from the depths of your soul; and the Hope that lies in something bigger than all of this, and all of us.
Sending Love and Peace and Hope and Joy out into the ether for all of you who are tending anything painful this Solstice.
It’s nearly 3 am on Christmas Eve, and for reasons known only to my hormones and neurology, I am wide awake and listening to the sound of decidedly un-Christmassy wind and rain, and scuffling rodents under the floor. The whole ‘not a creature is stirring…’ thing is not a thing in this house. We live in the countryside – in a situation that could be described as glorified camping – and rodents are ubiquitous. My mother couldn’t stay here for more than five minutes without booking herself into a Travelodge. My mother need not worry about rodents under my floor; she is 434 miles away, we’re all on lockdown, and, anyway, I am working. I need to get up in three hours, except I am already up.
A ‘frontline worker.’ I feel like a fraud. My NHS badge says otherwise, I suppose. But I am not saving lives. One might argue I am saving souls, but I don’t save anyone (or at least I am not the one doing the saving) I hold hands, stroke foreheads, speak quiet prayers, give gentle assurances, witness tears. Lots of tears. Mostly, I sit and breathe. A presence. Bearing witness to… human frailty, and human strength. The power of the body and the will to sustain that most miraculous of intangibles – the life-force. And oh, it is such a privilege, to be at this most intimate transition. Often when loved ones can’t be there. Often when they have just stepped out of the room for their first coffee in seven hours. Often when there is nobody.
And of course at Christmas, and especially this locked-down Christmas, it seems more poignant. Loved ones separated by gowns and masks and gloves, by care-home windows. Or by geography, as I am from mine. Our family Christmas will be via Zoom, as it will be for many. And my mind turns – as minds do at Christmas – to friends and loved ones I haven’t seen, whom I miss, even if we haven’t spoken for a while, for months. Maybe years…is it really that long? All the other humans I could have reached out to, and didn’t. All the conversations I would like to have. All the warm bodies I would like to hug. And I think of those I didn’t get a chance to see again.
It is all lapping around in my sensitive – wee hours of Christmas Eve morning – heart. A warm, amniotic sea… of Love. This is what cannot separate us. It is utterly tangible to me; here, at my kitchen table at 3 am, at those precious moments of dying, at the times of rawness and transition when I am perhaps most sensitive and attuned. And at all the other times too. It connects us all. Even – and perhaps especially – when we feel at our most separate.
So, I suppose this is the message I would send to all of you. I love you. You are loved. Have a blessed Christmas.
