Transition and Disruption at Winter Solstice

Turning tides of light and a poem from John O’Donohue

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I wasn’t planning to write today, but it’s the winter solstice and I find that I can’t not. I’m high on Scottish moors, transfixed by the ever-changing light on this stormy day. It’s the weather of alerts and advisories, the season for unsettled conditions and wide-ranging disruption.

Perhaps I’m especially sensitive to the changeability because I’m at a major turning point in my life; a transition from always being on call as a mother and employee to being an unrooted writer and only answerable to myself really.

The days are shorter here than at my home on the northeast coast of America, but the sunsets are longer. The light feels thinner, the air less dense—the colors take time and move softly, building to magnificent yet quiet glories.

Many years ago, I traveled to equatorial Africa, where the sun plummets around 6 pm like a rock dropped into a stream, reliable and colorless. I sat beside the Zambezi River one afternoon, just above Victoria Falls, where crocodiles idled in currents below the surface. As the sun began its descent, the monkeys that had been intent on thieving food from the tables around me hopscotched across the shallows to the rocks. In ones and twos, they perched facing westward, a solemn and entranced audience, like the humans on shore.

Something happens at sunset—there’s a disruption in the atmosphere. As a matter of physics, there are ionic changes that disrupt radio signals, but something metaphysical also happens while the light travels around us unseen, making the invisible visible. There are tricks of the light, yet miracles, too.

We are nearing the holy nights between Advent and New Year—it’s the season of endings and beginnings. The solstice brings a momentary halt in the pendulum’s swing that might feel like an entry point for the forces of chaos. It’s easy to withdraw into anxiety, but it also offers a moment of stillness—an opportunity to retreat. There is peace to be found here, an essential tonic for the soul in times of turmoil.

I am in the Highlands on my own retreat, caring for two terriers, a mother and daughter, aging yet spry. Their owners are a generous and interesting couple with strong African ties of their own. We shared dinner before they left and it was fun to discover the curious overlaps of our personal geographies.

Their home is a 19th-century manse built for the parish minister and used until quite recently. I asked if the architect was Sinclair MacDonald, my great-grandfather, but this house isn’t one he designed. All day, I have watched the drift of headlights on the lane approaching the turn to the church next door, but only funerals and the occasional wedding are held there these days.

The storm began during the night and the first light of morning crept in like fog—a tentative grayness blurring the dark. Out of the murk, for a few moments at noon, golden light spilled over the dull, heathered hills to the south. Now, the rain has marbled the windows and the wind is huffing around the chimney. Immense clouds, deep and gray as the ocean, sail by, capped lacy white by the low and far distant sun.

Sunset is approaching and I wonder if it will tear the sky apart, if the colors of blood will spill through. I wonder, if I gaze long enough, if I might glimpse the workshop of the gods and see where light itself is created.

Here is a poem called For Light, by John O’Donohue. You can find it in his collected works, To Bless the Space Between Us.

For Light

Light cannot see inside things.
That is what the dark is for:
Minding the interior,
Nurturing the draw of growth
Through places where death
In its own way turns into life.

In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive.

That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth.

That we never place our trust
In minds claimed by empty light,
Where one-sided certainties
Are driven by false desire.

When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.

That the searching of our minds
Be equal to the oblique
Crevices and corners where
The mystery continues to dwell,
Glimmering in fugitive light.

When we are confined inside
The dark house of suffering
That moonlight might find a window.

When we become false and lost
That the severe noon-light
Would cast our shadow clear.

When we love, that dawn-light
Would lighten our feet
Upon the waters.

As we grow old, that twilight
Would illuminate treasure
In the fields of memory.

And when we come to search for God,
Let us first be robed in night,
Put on the mind of morning
To feel the rush of light
Spread slowly inside
The color and stillness
Of a found world.

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