This past weekend was the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. From here onward, light returns, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. We are also finally standing on the edge of a new year. This past year felt like an earthquake, it felt like a mudslide; the news, the climate, the world, the job market ― everything felt like chaos and nothing felt in control. I know many loved ones who weathered significant storms. Friendships and relationships might have felt unmoored and uncertain. I contributed no small part to that, in a journey clawing out of the darkness. To my friends: I know I was not untouched by that turbulence. While the light does not return all at once, minute by minute, thank you for taking my hand and walking with me towards it.
A month ago, a calendar placeholder was created for T’s “holiday hoo-ha” and in advance, she invited me and two others to pick poems of choice to read out loud in honor of Yalda, a Persian winter solstice celebration on the year’s longest night. The celebration symbolizes the victory of light over darkness, poetry, and storytelling especially about rebirth and the future horizon. I picked two epistolary poems from Natalie Díaz and Ada Limón’s correspondence-as-art. M’s ancestors are from Iran and she meditated on selecting a poem written by a lesser-known Persian poet, then eventually picked a Rumi. When she mentions this decision prior to her reading, we murmur: “Rumi always wins.”
All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
On the morning after the hoo-ha, I arrived early for a movement class, and L suggested a short walk to the ocean while they prepared the room for the workshop. Winter does, in fact, present as winter here. Everything I was wearing as my outer layer was waterproof, except for (of course) my shoes. I attempted to tred carefully on the completely-wet-winter sand, and took note of the edges of foam where the tide met the land. Despite my intent on not getting my shoes wet (you had one job!), the ocean entranced me, distracted me, and I set music to the waves as the tide taunted my shoes and soaked them, too, as it also started raining. When I returned from my walk drenched, L’s face was set in apology for sending me out before an unexpected rain shower, but I shook my head and smiled. Living in the Netherlands conditioned me to feel like any other rain elsewhere is tolerable.
Later that afternoon, we sat together touching limb-to-limb in the heat of the sauna (in this case with full consent to our bodies for becoming completely drenched) awaiting J to begin the first ceremony of the day, and the person who was prepared to provide music on her flute paused. She asked if she could offer some words first.
Some themes arose from both gatherings.
In February next year, we will finally come out of the year of the snake’s introspective skin-shedding renewal, and move towards the fire horse’s freedom, adventure, and momentum. The room hummed with hope as the flautist said a prayer for us to get ready to ride. Bodies sweating out what we need to leave behind. Contemplating one’s own limits, tolerance, life, death, choice, control.
Heat + time coaxing out the idea that a sensation that seems intolerable may turn into a completely different sensation or revelation entirely. There’s an intense need inside me to keep moving, to stay productive, to not sit still. I am reminded of what it feels like to let go, to allow abundance and patience take lead. An exchange of pain and discomfort into something neutral, and sometimes even blooming into something hoovering around pleasure. The release when one has the choice about when to leave the heated room, skin and hair releasing heat, heart pounding as if we actually have been riding.
After the first ceremony, R sat next to me on a tree strump in regal silence outside of the room, the steam from his skin curling into the winter air. Everyone else chose soft surfaces, but he sat with his body at attention and eyes closed, hands extended and palms upwards towards what the universe might give to us if only we remain open to it. He says with his eyes still closed that usually you don’t get to see people’s auras surrounding them, but today, we do.
I reach into T’s mantras from her talk in Berlin:
When ambition is rooted in wonder instead of fear, it transforms. Work becomes expression rather than escape. Growth becomes spacious rather than frantic. Impact comes not from proving, but from presence.
Be disciplined, yes—but not in self-erasure.
Listen deeply—to others, and especially to yourself.
Let go of the need to define everything.
To remember even as we prepare to ride together at dawn, that even in the riding we should take time to pause, to listen. (Even to the roughest surf there’s a rhythm findabale which is why we keep coming here, to find it, said Carl Phillips.)
We will not find what we are seeking by chasing more.
We will find it when we stop running long enough to listen.
That belonging is not a place to reach, it is a felt sense of safety in our own bodies.
Limón, on how it might feel to make our way back to green:
What is it about words that make the world
fit easier? Air and time. […]
Maybe this letter is to say, if it is red where you are,
know there is also green, the serrated leaves of dandelion, lemon balm,
purple sage, peppermint, a small plum tree by the shed.
I don’t know how to make medicine, or cure what’s scarring
this planet, but I know that last night the train came roaring
right as I needed it. I was alone and I was time, but
the train made a noise so I would listen. I was standing so
close, a body on a bridge, that I could feel how
the air shifted to make room for the train. How it’s easier
if we become more like a body of air, branches, and make room
for this red charging thing that barrels through us,
how afterward our leaves shake and stand straighter.