Darkest Night
Dear friends, what a year it’s been! I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling quite the same Christmas vibe pulsing through my veins this year. Partly because of circumstance but mainly because 2020 has been a long road of bumps and potholes and now feels like a good moment to quietly enjoy having made it this far relatively intact. It’s not that I don’t want to celebrate, god knows we all deserve some of that, but it also feels really right to spend some time, in this unique lockdown-imposed absence of the usual end of year rush, to also honor what we’ve lived through. That includes honoring the pain and loss so many are feeling right now, separated from loved ones and having Christmas plans thrown into disarray at the last moment. This year more than ever, Christmas was a shining light on the horizon.
Looking for the lessons and the openings has been a practice I’ve relied on heavily this year, an inwards and outwards dance with myself to try to make meaning and keep moving forward. Nature has always provided a portal into what lies within and beyond myself and this year in particular I’ve learned more from looking at the tree outside my window than so many other things.
Today’s winter solstice feels particularly ripe for reflection and even more of a new year than 1 January does, especially after a year that has itself felt like a kind of solstice, a deep pause. It’s 4.30pm and the darkness has begun its longest arc into the dawn, where light and dark will be briefly suspended before the sun is reborn and pivots toward Spring.
Tonight is the night to sit in the pause and wait in the knowledge that the pivot back towards life will come. To trust that the seeds I planted this year, hold the potential for great possibility, even though I can’t see it yet. That some things will be left behind and others carried forward. That there is cause for celebration and for honoring.
I will celebrate my resilience, adaptability and the discovery of an even deeper strength. I will honor that relaxing and trusting is still a work in progress for me and that even though I know that there is so much I cannot even contemplate let alone control, I still struggle with truly Knowing this.
I will celebrate all the things I’ve remembered about myself and what I really love and need to truly live. I will celebrate my love for the energy of the city and I will honor my discomfort living in a city without its energy. I will celebrate my deep desire for spaciousness in my life inside and out and I will honor how I’ve wished so many times this year to be somewhere, anywhere else.
I will celebrate the realization that living on the other side of the world to my family was based on the false comfort of being able to return at a moment’s notice and I will honor all of the moments when this realization felt too much to bear.
I will celebrate my continued good health, security and support network and I will honor those times when I struggled to be grateful for this.
I will also celebrate and honor YOU and everything you’ve done or not done, seen and unseen, to survive and thrive this past year. Living life in the container of a pandemic has amplified everything – our strengths and our fears and thankfully also the undeniable fact that life is truly lived in relationship-with ourselves, each other and everything else, all the time.
Even though this year continues to pull the rug out from under us, the solstice reminds me that I am always in conversation with the darkness and the light. Just as my in breath has an out breath, each outward focus of my attention, must pivot back towards itself and return to centre before it begins again, anew and with the benefit of hindsight. This is the pulse of evolution that we are all connected to, whether we are aware of it or not. It propels us forward, even from the darkest of nights. A universal heartbeat that lies beneath, there to remind us of what we’ve forgotten – that a new dawn is always born.
I wish you and your precious heart solstice blessings and the spaciousness to honor and celebrate the wild and glorious you that made it this far. In the days and months ahead, may you follow what is calling your heart forward and away from fear in all the ways that feel life giving to you.
As always, inwards and onwards and with much love, Amanda x