The Solstice Pause

At the end of a cycle, we return to where we began: the cradled dark of the soil

Moon over the Worcester Range on Winter Solstice Morning, 2021

In Response to “Happy Solstice & Return of the Light”

I am not praising the light
not yet

Earth does not turn
on a dime

If this year has taught me anything
it is this:

It can get darker still

There is a hover, a pause
on the darkest day

no hurry

I’ll rest here like a chipmunk 
beneath a maple

roots dreaming of future sap
buried in cold, in dark –

the place where sweetness
begins

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Until this year, I celebrated Winter Solstice for the return of the light, and so that sentiment – “Happy Solstice & Return of the Light” – which was shared as an email sign-off, is familiar and warm.  

It’s common to celebrate the Solstice on one day, but there is a pause: two days the same length, four days within six seconds of each other.  Where I live in Vermont, that’s 8 hours 50 minutes 26 seconds of daylight.  It’s as if the sun hovers in the same place on the horizon for these four days.

I wrote this poem with a yearning for that pause.  Thinking of the past two years, of my mom’s diagnosis, and how one word can change an entire future: Alzheimer’s.  

Of the losses already piling up: an invisible mound of what will not be and what is already gone.  

Of wanting to pause this particular cycle.

I wrote it, too, as a sinking into the presence of this season.  How at the end of a cycle, we often return to where we began: the cradled dark of the soil, like the womb.  We aren’t made to rush forward into light at every moment.  Humans are animals, too, like chipmunks beneath maple trees, and rest is the essential beginning to all future doings, all future harvests.  

Today, tonight, I praise the dark and wrap myself deeper in the quiet that is here.