The winter solstice was last night at about 10:00 pm mountain time, making it “the darkest evening of the year” (if you’re Robert Frost). That means we’ve come to the end of the long slide into darkness and now we can climb back out.
I don’t have many deep thoughts about this one, other than relief. But this end of a poem by Patricia Fargnoli that I posted last year seems appropriate:
…this is the slowed-down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.