My dark thoughts on the Winter Solstice

Happy Winter Solstice! It’s Alban Arthan, Yule, the darkest day of the year, celebrated from dusk on the 21st to dawn on the 22nd. From now on there’s one more minute of light every day, yay!

I’m high up on windswept Cairnpapple Hill - site of an ancient Scottish temple - greeting the dawn and sending you blessings on the wind. It’s now raining heavily!

I usually talk about the tastes and flavours of the wild foods I forage. My passion for the medicinal attributes of plants and fungi or the health benefits of the Wildbiome Project. But today, this deeply special day in the Celtic calendar - and despite being a very private person by nature - I want to share with you a little about how my soul encounters nature.

Foraging for all my food for a whole year brought me better health but also really deepened my connection to nature and the ‘spirit of the earth’. By that I mean the awareness of Life itself as ‘alive’; the animating force that infuses atoms and matter; stirs our souls and psyche; unites us through the subconscious and our dreams; and dances through everything in creation while also remaining a frustrating cosmic mystery! The more time you spend in nature, empty-handed but open-hearted, the more intimate the ‘numinous’ becomes.

My track record with religion is poor. I am suspicious of its rules, exclusions and constraints. Its language doesn’t sit easily with me. How can you relate to a loving heavenly Father or a nurturing earthly Mother if your own experience of parenting was abandonment? Yet, this numinous wind still whispered in my ears and accosted my heart!

The need ‘to belong’ is strong. I traced back the roots of my family. My childhood was fractured and fragmented. On my mother’s side my ancestors were scattered across continents for 200 years. Yet, on my father’s side there is a long, strong, intergenerational thread that binds me to place, to the lost, ancient Horwood Forest in Gloucestershire. This thread traces back to the native Dobunni tribe of the Hwicce, at the time of the druids. Druidism was the spiritual practice of Britain’s indigenous Celtic people, ruthlessly suppressed by the Roman colonisers who slaughtered as many druid men and ‘wild women’ as they could - before much of our oral knowledge was recorded.

Modern druidry was reconstructed in the 1700s from the oral traditions that still survived in folk lore and ritual, and the scant written records. Yet it is the closest practice we have of our own indigenous culture that left so many clues in British archaeology: the standing stones, the ancient saunas, Skara Brae, Callanish, Stonehenge, Avebury and so many more - including my local Cairnpapple. Curious and drawn to study it further, becoming a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD), I found in druidry a practice that is utterly inclusive, centred on a respect for nature and desire for peace. For those in Britain and Western Europe, sensitive to cultural appropriation but seeking a community and structure within which to celebrate their spirituality, this is about as close as it gets.

For me, observing the festivals of the Celtic Wheel of the Year - whether you follow a particular path or not - adds depth and meaning to the seasons. Their nuances unite both the outer and the inner worlds; the workings of nature with the movement of psyche. We are creatures after all and we follow the same cycles of birth, growth, maturation and death in both our bodies and the more mythical themes of our lives.

Nature has an incredible ability to reflect these themes back to us, reciprocating time we spend in stillness with insights and wisdom. (The reason I invite you to a Summer Solstice Wilderness Ceremony each year.) The forms, shapes, colours, and movements of nature, our encounters with non-human beings (animals, plants, mushrooms), offer symbols that we easily imbue with meaning. Our human psyche is quickly at home in nature and alert to these signs, which often enrich our lives with greater clarity and direction. It never ceases to amaze me at how universally this process works for all of us.

It is no accident that so many historical spiritual figures spend time in the wilderness, the desert and the far-away places, in retreat from the deafening busyness of the world to listen to the whispering of the spirit. Neither is it an accident that in modern times we talk about ‘green prescriptions’ and realise the huge benefits of nature for our mental health.

This is why this morning finds me wrapped up against the cold, braced against the wind and driving rain on Cairnpapple Hill - a place where humans have gathered in prayer for over 5,500 years. On the spring and autumn equinoxes, the sun rises and sets along a line that connects Traprain Law, Arthurs Seat, Cairnpapple Hill and my house. So it’s a special place for me.

It’s dark, it’s cold, the wind is ‘blawin a hooley’! Appropriate weather to remind us of the symbolism of this ancient festival, the Winter Solstice, on the darkest day of the year. It takes courage to face the dark around us, and the darkness within. The relationship between humanity and the Earth, seems cracked and at a critical point. The human community is fractured and polarised. The horrors of war, the tragedy of displacement, and callous poverty stalk the land.

But today we are reminded that light returns. A single minute more of daylight each day in the gloom of winter becomes the endless days of summer. This candle I light, trembling in the dark and wind, lights many more flames in this circle and illuminates this sacred space. Slowly the sun will lighten the sky.

Each small act of kindness, each prayer for peace, each welcome to a stranger, each word spoken for fairness and justice - each joins the other and in unity creates the tidal wave of change we need to set the world right on its axis.

As the Earth corrects its tilt today, to face brighter days, my prayer is for this needed change, my hope is recalibration and renewal. We know the science; we are witness to the slaughter; we hear the pleas. Let us commit to acts of love because only love creates the fires of passion that bring about positive change.

This dark winter festival mirrors the eternal cycle of death and renewal. Without this reminder that the light always returns, it is easy to give up in despair. Yule reflects hope back to us on the darkest day when all that is bright feels lost. Here, high on the hill I can see far, across all the points of the compass.

Hail the fertile, creative darkness of the north; light is reborn. May there be peace in the north.

Hail the flickering fires of the south; hope is rekindled. May there be peace in the south.

Hail the cleansing rain of the west; life is renewed. May there be peace in the west.

Hail the fierce, wintry winds of the east; change comes. May there be peace in the east.

May there be peace in all the world.

Peace in the earth below us, where our ancestors mingle with the seeds of new life.

Peace in the heavens above us, where the spirits of mystery and awe whisper on the wind.

Peace here, in our gentle hearts.

May there be peace in all the world.

X