Winter Solstice 2025
The solstice reminds us that rest is not failure. Darkness is not defeat.
This morning I awoke on the shortest day of light of the year — the winter solstice.
The day the ancients marked carefully, long before calendars and clocks, when sunlight meant everything: when to plant, when to travel, when it was safe simply to see. Before our modern incandescent suns lit every room on command, light was survival, order, and hope.
Different peoples honored this day in different ways. Some mourned what had died. Some celebrated rebirth and the turning of the calendar. Some burned a Yule log — not as spectacle, but as symbol — a way of saying let the old year be consumed, and make room for what comes next.
Today, the Earth has reached that quiet pivot point in its long, patient wobble — the North Pole angled as far from the sun as it will go. This is the least light we will know. From here forward, even if imperceptibly at first, the days begin their slow return.
I find something comforting in that.
Winter still lies ahead, with its cold mornings and bitter winds, but the direction has changed. And sometimes direction matters more than distance.
Today I sit with gratitude — for the year behind me, imperfect and instructive as it was, and for the year ahead, unseen but already leaning toward possibility. I think about how nature itself teaches patience: how snow settles over mountains, trees, and fields like a white blanket, not to smother them, but to let them rest. To sleep. To gather strength for what will bloom again — new leaves, new green, new life — when the time is right.
The solstice reminds us that rest is not failure. Darkness is not defeat. And renewal often begins long before we can feel its warmth.
Merry Christmas.
I’m going back to bed
.