This October, I am “reissuing” some of my older Tangled Path pieces. This one is from Solstice 2022—tomorrow is NOT the solstice, but I thought this piece might prepare us all for the coming long nights.
Tomorrow is the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. The darkest night of the year.
As humans we often seem a little afraid of darkness. In spiritual circles people are often encouraged to confront their shadows—the ugly, unappetizing parts of us that we would rather not witness. Many of our ideals about human behavior are rendered into a simple binary of dark vs light. Maybe these dark days can be frightening because we don’t know what orcs might come tumbling out of some hidden Mordor within us!
But darkness is also generative. Seeds germinate in the dark within the earth. We gestate within the darkness of our mothers’ wombs. We spend a third of our lives in the darkness of sleep and dreams. Visions come to us in darkness—for example, Saint Catherine Labouré was woken in the night by the voice of a child calling her to the chapel, where she experienced an encounter with the Virgin Mary.
The days are short now, the nights long. This time of year can be a fertile darkness where our souls can dream in a way that isn’t quite possible under the relentless light of the midsummer sun.
The human relationship with darkness must go back millennia. I think about this particularly in relation to the Neolithic monuments that linger on the landscape in Ireland and the Celtic countries (as well as other locations around the world). Not the stone circles but their older relatives, the chambered monuments. When you go inside them it is as if you are entering the womb of the earth. At Carrowkeel in County Sligo, you must literally drop to your knees and crawl inside, as if entering the birth canal. Famously at Newgrange in the Brú na Bóinne, the rising sun on winter solstice shines through a light box built at the entrance of the monument, illuminating the path inside and the central chamber. However, a short distance from Newgrange, the passage tomb of Dowth celebrates its opposite—the setting sun on winter solstice. This is truly a monument to darkness.
We will probably never truly understand these ritual landscapes crafted by ancestors so distant that they feel like legends (the Irish name for Newgrange is Sí an Bhrú, the house of the faeries or gods). But just because we don’t know the people who built these sites does not mean we can’t respond to them, can’t feel them stirring some ancient recognition within us. I believe this symbolic celebration of light and dark, birth and death, life and rebirth, calls to us in a way we almost cannot express in the age of electric lights and Amazon deliveries. Places like Carrowkeel seem to me to be an outer expression of an inner understanding—or at least, the attempt to understand—perhaps the urge to explore the things we cannot explain.
Let’s not rush through the darkness this season. Don’t be too keen to push it away with lights and TVs and noise. Let in that deep, velvet quiet.
To me this is the most creative time of the year. With leaves stripped away, I can see the bare limbs of the trees, the outline of the landscape. The world, softened by snow, is quieter and more simplified. I can hear the inner whispers within more clearly than at other times of the year. While there is always a part of me that dreads the long nights, there is another part that craves the darkness, the increased stillness. Here I can breathe. Here are the threads of light spinning back to my ancestors. And here dwells the magic of creativity, born out of the fruitful dark.