24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being: December 21
Winter Solstice.
In honor of the winter solstice today, one little seasonal announcement: Signups for Winter 2025 session of DIVE, Creative Fuel Collective’s seasonal writing group are open.
This writing group is facilitated by and meets once a month January-March. You also get weekly prompts and it’s a super cozy and collaborative space to nurture a writing practice.
You can choose between the Tuesday cohort or the Thursday cohort. Sign up by December 31, 2024 and get special early bird pricing.
Ok now to our winter solstice celebrating….
Welcome to 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being, a digital Advent calendar for slowing down and making space for presence, creativity, and gratitude. Thank you for being here. If you missed a day you can catch up here.
Happy winter solstice!
Today, the sun pauses. Takes a breath. Stands still. Steadies itself before it begins to inch back into our lives.
Solstice is not just a singular moment, it’s a process, a transition.
On this shortest day of the year, we’re actually closer to the sun than we are in summer. Closer to the heat, the energy. But in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re tilted away from it, hidden from the light. We seek out our long shadows, asking what the darker hours have to tell us. What secrets they have to share.
It will take a couple more weeks before we’re as close as we’ll be to the sun in the annual cycle. Perihelion, as this moment is called, occurs on January 4th. We might be some three million miles closer to the sun than we are in summer, and yet, it is still so incredibly, unfathomably far away. It takes light only about 8 minutes to cover the distance from the earth to the sun. On our two legs, it would take us humans 3,536 years1 to walk it.
We celebrate at that distance.
There’s magic in this moment of winter solstice. There’s tension. There’s festivity. There’s stillness. There’s movement. There’s unknown. There’s what’s behind. There’s what’s ahead. A simultaneous crescendo and decrescendo.
I’ve been reading Nina Maclaughlin’s beautiful Winter Solstice2 this week, and I appreciate how she touches on a bit of this duality.
There is the math that guides the path of our sun and our path around it, the laws of physics, the magnetic pull of a star that weighs 333,000 times more than this earth. We know that the light blasts along at 671 million miles per hour. We know the angle of the axis on which our earth spins, we know the core of the sun burns at twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit, we know our life would not exist without it, we need its return and it will return. We know so much. There are so many facts. And right alongside them, a whole world we can’t explain or comprehend, which we cannot give words to, an understanding of presence and goneness, of departure and return, the haunt and mystery, we see it and sense it but cannot say it. And this is the magic, this incomprehensible unsaid, this is the beauty in this dark moment of the year, what we see without seeing.
It is easy to identify the facts and figures of the sun as Maclaughlin writes, easy to look at diagrams of how the earth orbits. Yet what the solstice offers up, what space it occupies, what experience it delivers—this is better felt.
Felt in morning stillness, felt in celebration, felt in the lighting of a candle.
Today we celebrate midwinter. A moment that asks us what we leave behind and what we step into. A moment when we can be sure that yes, the sun does return. No, we don’t know what’s ahead, but we’re willing to move towards it.
Honor the solstice. Take an active part in feeling the pause, in creating what's to come.
Unplug: a reminder to reconnect.
Find quiet: a reminder to listen.
Go outside: a reminder that we are a part of a natural cycle.
Light a flame: a reminder that light is always there.
Hold a green branch: a reminder that life will return.
Breathe: a reminder that you are alive for another season.
Honor the darkness. Stand still.
Welcome the light back, around you, and within you.
-Anna
Have questions about the Advent Calendar? Check this page.