In honor of the Winter Solstice, we explore the gifts of the dark even as we turn toward the returning sun.
The Presence and Presents of the Dark
Rev. Joe Cleveland
December 22, 2024
UU Saratoga
Imagine this: It is a holiday gathering. It’s a small family. All of them adults now. Let’s say there is a mother and her thirtysomething daughter. Picture them in your mind if you can. Invent them. The daughter hands her mother a wrapped package. The two of them are exchanging gifts. The mother unwraps the present, and it’s a paper cardboard box. She lifts the top of the box off, leaving the bottom resting on the table in front of her. Let’s say she’s sitting down and the box is on her lap. She puts the box top and the wrapping paper to one side. It’s clothing of some sort in the box. She lifts a shirt out of the box and holds it up, turning it to and fro. She says to her daughter, “Oh, it’s very nice, sweetheart, thank you. Very nice. Did you keep the receipt?”
Some gifts are hard to receive. Some gifts we would like to return. Some gifts don’t feel like gifts.
I’m not sure that a gift is actually a gift unless it is both given and received. If it doesn’t feel like a gift, then it’s a burden. What I’m wondering is the extent to which it might be possible that being open to receive changes whatever it is that is coming our way.
Our world is a world of cycles and reversals, gifts and losses. The planet we’re on is tilted a little cockeyed with respect to its orbit around the sun, which creates the cycle of the sun retreating and then returning, days getting shorter and then longer again. The tilt of the planet dips us into darkness, and then back out again.
As much as the dark nights can feel deep dark, it seems fortunate that there is a rhythm and a cycle to this. I imagine that if the earth wasn’t tilted on its axis and each day was was just as long as the last, and the length of the night never changed, if the season never changed and the only way to experience a different season was to travel north or south — On that planet I wonder if we would have a harder time learning resilience. That there is this cycle to our planet feels reassuring to me. If waxing and waning, ebb and flow, is the way of things here, then it can be the way of things for me, too.
Because things will happen. As the title of one of my favorite books has it, Someday a Bird Will Poop on You. Winter will come. The writer and podcaster Katherine May explores winter as a spiritual experience in a memoir she called Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. She says,
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.
Katherine May has been hit with many seasons of wintering, including an emotional breakdown when she was seventeen, her husband’s appendix bursting, navigating her autism and neurodivergence.
In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way that it ravages us.
And yet,
Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.
The world around us can give us some insight, she explains.
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. [. . .] Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
We don’t get to choose not to winter. This time of plunging into darkness can’t be avoided or stopped. But we can choose how we will winter. In Nikki Giovanni’s poem called “A Journey” that I shared last Sunday, she describes how the train tracks that she’s following have been covered up by the winter, leaving her with no trail, no direction. She realizes that “we must provide our own guideposts.” It’s up to us to mark out how we will travel.
Susan Cooper’s poem “The Shortest Day” begins by contemplating and sharing the ways that people have responded to the cycle of darkness:
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
Even when we put up all these lights, the point isn’t for the lighting to be stark, bright, casting all shadows and darkness away. The lights would not be special if it wasn’t for the darkness that they glow in. The Japanese novelist Tanizaki casts his mind back to early human history and in his imagination perceives how much darkness people would be experiencing. Before electric lights, there was flickering flame that brings with it a play of shadows as much as a play of light. Early humans would have lived in a great deal of darkness. We try to banish it away. Tanizaki says,
The quality we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.
We cannot wish away the dark, and must acknowledge the fact of life and death in the world. Tanizaki describes how while we in the west use silver and steel and nickel tableware, and we keep it polished up. On the contrary, says Tanizaki, the Japanese may use similar tableware, but they prefer that it not be polished.
. . . we begin to enjoy it only when the lister has worn off, when it has begun to take a dark smoky patina. Almost every householder has had to scold an insensitive maid who has polished away the tarnish so patiently waited for.
If we must winter, if we must confront the dark, we can reconsider winter and the dark. What wisdom might we gain from our experience with this darkness, this wintering?
Nikki Giovanni wrote a poem called “Winter Poem.” It’s a poem that can seem perhaps a little precious or sentimental, but there’s more to it than that.
once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower
The snow and its cold needs to be acknowledged, even loved. How will you be with the dark? The wintering?
In Giovanni’s poem, she lets herself be changed by the snowflake. She embraces this element of winter, kisses it, let’s the snowflake invite its friends and family in, she lets the snow engulf her. . and she flowers.
May we offer reverence to the winter solstice. When the bad news comes, no matter how big it is, it isn’t everything. And you can choose how to respond to it. May we be open to the potential for wisdom and experience in wintering as a chosen practice.
Blessed be. Amen.
“In Celebration of Winter Solstice” by Stephanie Noble
Resources
- May, Katherine. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.
- Salvi, Sue. Someday a Bird Will Poop on You: A Life Lesson. United States, Little, Brown, 2018.
- Cooper, Susan. The Shortest Day. United States, Candlewick Press, 2024.
- Tanizaki, Junichiro. In Praise of Shadows. Sedgwick, ME: Leete’s Island Books, 1977.
Topics: Presence, Winter Solstice