In the Still Womb of Darkness: A Winter Solstice Ritual

The deep, dark, still point of the year is less than 1 week away. Can you feel its gentle grasp, drawing you downwards, inwards?

It is in this darkness we can be known at the core of our being. It is the place of utmost surrender.

Darkness asks us to stop doing. To lay down our outer mantle, to get naked, to find the core truth of ourselves underneath the hustle of daily life.

In the darkness we can be with our most subtle body-and-soul truths. In fact, Darkness lures this out of us. Darkness craves this from us. Craves the inner core of beingness that lives within us.

She’s not interested in our accolades, our to-do list, or achievements. She’s interested in the way we love, in our longings, in our deepest secrets, and in our holy shadow. ​

Each year on Winter Solstice I spend the whole day in simple ceremony. I take the day away from technology and electricity. No lights after dark. Only candles and fire. I lean back into the warm skin of Darkness and I practice fully being. Any action I do is inspired by my body’s unfolding. Out of my head. Into my felt senses.

There’s a lot of laying on the couch. Dozing in and out of sleep and dreaming. Watching the flames of the candles.

I feel.

There's often tears. There's often joy. Sometimes my body wants to stretch or dance or go for a gentle stroll. Sometimes I’m inspired to journal or draw.

But there’s no agenda. Nothing I’m “planning,” even if it’s meditation or a bath. No mental construction of the day.

Only being with, listening, and following.

If I get an idea of what I “want” to do, I check in with my body. I listen underneath the mental story. I sit in stillness for a while. Is this idea unfolding from the beingness of my body or from an agenda of my mind? It’s a fun curiosity to track.

This yearly ritual has become so sacred to me. I always feel more deeply connected to myself and Mystery, and renewed on a soul-level. I'm never fully ready for the light to return, but this intentional communion certainly helps.

This art of being, listening, and following is one that has been all but lost in our industrial modernity of striving and doing and achieving.

It's not necessarily easy to do when you have responsibilities or appointments or deadlines, so it's not a state we truly enter into very often. But we can practice living it in small moments, and not only at this time of year.

I crave time of no agenda, and if I don’t get it regularly I feel my soul withering. I feel a loneliness creep in, and I know it's time to spend more time with the deeper aspects of my being.

Most often I get this experience while being in the woods, with the plants, or in communion with the elements of nature. But we can also attune to our beingness in simple moments throughout our days. It just takes practice.

This yearly ceremony of spacious time in the practice of being and listening is one of the most nourishing things I do for my soul.

So I thought it might be something you would want to try?

Even if for an hour in these days surrounding Solstice... let yourself be with the dark stillness of the year's end.

Let yourself have no agenda. If you have a thought about what to do, don’t do it yet. Pause. Be with your body. Let your body take the lead. What is inspired from this place of so deeply being with yourself?

To get you inspired, here are three of my favorite quotes about the darkness: ​

Perdita Finn says, "In the light we think we understand everything, we are convinced we know everything, we feel in control and in charge. In the darkness we must surrender to mystery. This is where life always renews itself -- in the darkness of the dirt and the womb."

​In his book, "Waking Up to the Dark," Clark Strand writes, "Because we no longer honor the darkness, we have lost touch with the journey of the soul... What we do to our bodies with antibiotics, we do to consciousness with light. Our souls have become sterile. In killing the darkness, we have closed the channel that once gave human beings their principle contact with the world beyond... The person who chooses to turn off the lights and lie awake in darkness embraces the truth of a life before and beyond [our culture]."

Wendell Berry says, "To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."

Let yourself have this moment of communion with the sacred dark.​​

Let yourself know the darkness, so that you, too, can be known by it.