Walk Out to Winter

Saturday marks the arrival of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. For the pagans of Old Europe, this night marked the symbolic death and rebirth of the sun. Yule is what they called this time of year, after the 12-day winter festival marked by feasting, drinking, gathering around fires, and animal sacrifices (which provided the meat for the feast). Animals were sacrificed in part because of fertility rituals, but also for the practical reason of not having to feed them during the dark winter. Many of the traditions associated with the Christmas season, in fact, originated in pagan Yuletide celebrations (demonstrating that cultural appropriation is not simply a contemporary phenomenon). The Norse god Odin is, it would seem, one reason for the season.

I have always liked the winter solstice. One of the benefits of living in central Virginia, after all, is equal enjoyment of the four seasons (though summer sometimes seems slow to leave). I like the lengthening of night and the creep of darkness into afternoon. Light itself in winter is different—Emily Dickinson called attention to a “certain Slant of light” characteristic of winter afternoons, one that “oppresses, like the Heft/of Cathedral Tunes—.” But I don’t find the winter light to be oppressive, though I know others do. (There’s even a name for it: Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD.) I see a stark beauty in the jagged outlines of leafless trees, in the dowdy grasses brushed with frost, and in the smoky traces of breath, all illuminated by that certain Slant of light.

When our son Sam was young, my wife Marilyn and I would decorate our house for Christmas. But none of us are young anymore, and so we no longer do that. Marilyn, however, recreates a mantle of light over the fireplace every winter around the time of the solstice. I say recreate because no two years are exactly alike. She gathers our collection of silver ornaments, glass stars, and white, twinkling lights, and sets them together the way a conductor organizes a symphony orchestra. The Slant of light she captures always puts me in mind of fresh fallen snow at night. Our alter to light past and light to come did not start as a Yule or pagan ritual, but it has become just that. In bleak midwinter we embrace the encroaching darkness and look ahead to the sun’s rebirth, the return of the light, sharing the anticipation described so wonderfully by Rabindranath Tagore: “Light, my life, the world-filling light,/the eye-kissing light,/heart-sweetening light!”

Walk out to winter and welcome the light returning.

by Dr. Steve Dawson, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Advisor to Sangha