The Promise of Solstice

Singing up the sun on a rainy Solstice morning, we feel the clouds pressing down, a dark band above like a warning of things to come. Dark sky above, the city dark below, and yet in between, a narrow band of light. A red glow, a bright star on the horizon, a rain shower, and then a golden, glorious disc of light.

This is the promise of Solstice. It’s not written on a scroll or in a sacred book. It’s written in the sky and on the land, in the turning of the earth and in every green leaf that feeds on sunlight. No matter how dark the night, dawn will come. Darkness is a womb, pregnant with possibility. Mother Night labors through the longest night, and always, every Solstice morning since the beginning of the world, light is reborn.

We are the midwives. Here is the promise we each must make, if we are to get through this time and bring forth a new day. Labor is hard, and we have much hard work ahead, many waves of contractions, many moments when progress seems agonizingly slow. But we are strong. We have endurance, we have vision, and we have faith—faith in the common, everyday miracles we see all around us: a wound that heals, a seed that sprouts, a red dawn breaking through dark bands of a gathering storm.