A Blustery Morning and SNOW on the Peaks
All of heaven and all of earth coordinate at the Winter Solstice. Gregge Tiffen (Winter Solstice: The Christmas Story)
What I would exhort you to, what I would give as a gift to you, what I would lay down a soul for, would be for your awareness to recognize that this is a personal event for your life. It is the time that has been set up on this planet for you and Heaven to be with each other without interference. Gregge Tiffen (The Winter Solstice: Giving To Yourself – December, 2007)
The Muse is challenged to settle me down to focus this blustery morning. With sustained winds exceeding 15 miles per hour and gusts into the 50-mph range, Zadie Byrd and I were challenged to get in a short walk so she could take care of her morning business. It’s not a day for walking in the woods or grounding myself with a labyrinth walk. One close call with a falling tree is enough for this life.
I have other year-end distractions as well, opportunities and projects that warrant my attention and a promise to myself to finalize personal decisions around financial and health matters – the paperwork our legal system demands in order for our wishes to be followed. So, the Muse suggested we revisit Solstice posts past and see what might be relevant to where I find myself today. Good call Muse!
Six years ago, amidst a community controversy in which I was involved I wrote this: I’ve felt out of sync with the season and out of sorts with myself. I want to stop. I want to stop not just for a few minutes to catch my breath, center myself and move on to the next task or conversation, but I want to STOP and BE the winter. Quiet. Still. Peaceful. Yes, yes, YES!
I continued: My time for that will come. I feel her on the horizon. Until then, there are ‘miles to go before I sleep’ in these last days of autumn before that moment when heaven and earth synchronize at the Winter Solstice. I know without a doubt that I will be there.
I know too that I alone am responsible for choosing how I walk through the tasks along those miles. I choose calm, confident, clear, kind as my foundation. These are grounded in love. My choice is simple; implementation, not always easy. Often when I’m challenged, fear interrupts and invites me to its prickly path of tension, harshness, unkind words spoken and not. Too much of the world is on that path. I don’t want to be a part of that crowd. And so, I pause.
The divisiveness and angst in our world have intensified seemingly exponentially in the six years since I wrote those words. So too have the opportunities for personal growth and evolution, individually and collectively. It is on those opportunities that I want to focus my attention this Solstice time.
Just as I did then, I turn to Gregge Tiffen’s writings about this sacred time. I find this message perfect to remind me of the choices I can make now and moment to moment. Before my time of winter solitude and beyond winter into the spring:
Prelude (Winter Solstice: The Christmas Story)
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.
I need not wait for the Solstice to take Heaven, to take Peace, and to Look at the radiance in the darkness within and without. I take them now and allow the potency of this time to fill me. Yes, my time for the quiet of Solstice is on the horizon. That is my time to empty. That is my time to embrace the seeds of the new. To be receptive.
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. We too need to empty and make ourselves receptive to the new. Solstice is a time to declare one cycle complete, making way for another to begin. It is a time to embrace the realm of spirit and turn our backs on the material world, if only for a brief time. It is a time to bless and release all who have crossed your path in this cycle, knowing that those who are meant to return will be there in the new one.
And, perhaps most important of all, it is time to let go of who we were in the cycle that is completing. The ‘you’ of that cycle is complete as well. And a new you of your design and making awaits.
As our planet celebrates her birthday, let us honor her by taking time to reflect this gift of the time when heaven and nature sing as one. May we each sing along in our own unique and harmonious way. JOY to Our World … WE Have Come!
… Just Sayin’…