Solstice Altar 2025

All of heaven and all of earth coordinate at the Winter Solstice. … Regardless of all the stories and traditions, this is a personal event of your life. It is the time that has been set up for you and Heaven to be with each other without interference. … It is the Silent Night, the stillness, the good-bye, the time in the manger with nature, with earth itself, in which you commit to the harmony of the earth. Gregge Tiffen (Winter Solstice: The Christmas Story)

I’m beginning to settle into what, for me, is a most sacred time in the seasonal cycles – the Winter Solstice. As the daylight becomes shorter here in the northern hemisphere, I feel the pull to go within. This is the way of the natural world, the world that we are of, for We are Nature.

The last four days have found me immersed in the online State of the World Forum 2025. Yesterday morning I was aiming to create a Solstice post before the day’s proceedings began. But I discovered that wasn’t the energetic flow of the day, and rather than attempting to be like a salmon and swim upstream, I surrendered into the flow that was offered. No rush. No push. No muti-tasking distractions. I followed the lead of the heart and gave myself permission to delay the post.

With the Forum behind me and much to muse and integrate, I begin to snuggle in for this deeply personal time of review and releasing all things of this cycle that will soon complete. I wonder what can one, one who is this part of the One, say at this Solstice amidst so much disruption, dissolution, dissonance, and pain?

Remember that you too are an important piece of the greater unfolding puzzle of universal flow and evolution. You are one of and with all that is, ever evolving as is all Life, seen and unseen. Just as Mother Earth prepares for the new at Solstice, so do you and I. We let go of everything, emptying so we can welcome the new.

All too often we fear being empty – even for a brief moment in time. Emptiness seems like a strange word to ascribe to the season of winter holidays with their bright lights, joyful sounds, and festivities to match.  And, yet, giving yourself the gift of emptying is an important part of being prepared to receive.

Remember and honor that which you know deep inside: this is your time to recalibrate from the inside out.  And, to do so you must empty, release, let go and recognize the wisdom that done is done. In the Christmas Story, we are told that the inn was full. And, yet a receptive place for the birth was found. So it is for each of us.

I find this excerpt from Gregge Tiffen’s ‘Winter Solstice: The Christmas Story’* a beautiful reminder of the choices I can make now and moment to moment, before my time of winter solitude, and beyond winter into the spring. May it support you as well to ease into the sacredness of this time and all that lies ahead.

Prelude*

There is nothing I can give you which you have not got; but there is much, very much, that while I cannot give it, you can take.

No Heaven can come to us, unless our hearts find rest in today.

Take Heaven

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.

Take Peace

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see, and to see, we have only to look, I beseech you,

Look!

In the quiet there is tranquility. May your life move and radiate in that unity and your heart sing the hymn of peace to all mankind.

And so, at this time I greet you not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with prayer that for now and forever the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.

Twinkling Lights and the Dragonfly Hearth