The celestial doings in our corner of the Cosmos often pique my own doings. The Winter Solstice, when the light begins to gain time in our days, is one of those significant “doings.” Light lifts me up, extroverts me, helps me.
“From out of the deepest, darkest night of the year comes a “new-born” sun, full of promise for days of greater light and warmth. It is this event that symbolically reminds us that light comes out of our darkness, the chaos of our lives, the heartbreak and the pain we sometimes endure. Yule is about promise.”
-From Wicca: A Year and a Day, by Timothy Roderick
As is traditional, at least for me, I use this time to reflect. Try to get up & out of the rut of my daily thinking and habits and take a look at this life I am living.
What am I liking these days?
What am I avoiding lately?
How’m I doing with that whole procrastination thing I’m prone to…
What are my actions saying that my words aren’t?
And the ever popular: that which no longer serves me: out!
I have a burn pit in my back yard. It’s not fancy, but oh so effective. It’s not for regular, uh, trash…but special refuse. (Now, there is an interesting word, refuse. It can be both a verb and a noun, but basically meaning the same thing! I use it here as the noun).
Special refuse: things that once held a special place or meaning that must now be given up to disengage from any energetic hold they may have on/with me. To make space for anything new, a Solstice Burn is a cleansing of sorts…
…Old drawings. Love letters from sundry exes. Recipes are never successful in my kitchen. Years ago, an acquaintance once burned three years’ worth of her old diaries at my Winter Solstice burn pit, the handwritten pages sparking, charring, and flaring up into the night sky.
This year it will be just me at the burn pit. I will feed it some artwork, the crinoline from my wedding dress, and reams and reams and reams of papers with once-meaningful words on them.
It will all be transformed in my heart, a fire feast to feed the returning light. To clear away the darkness that resides not on the physical plane but in the energetic one…
…in our little corner of the Cosmos.
