Gratitude

Glad for More Daylight

Reflections on the winter solstice

In the Seattle area, we’ve been feeling our days start to turn dark around four in the afternoon lately. Today our sunset happens at 4:20 p.m.

But today, December 21, is also the winter solstice for us, so our daylight hours will grow longer now.

I never used to think much about the seasonal markers like this. I thought about holidays, but I didn’t think about the physical movement of the earth in relation to the sun (and other celestial bodies).

My ex-wife is a Waldorf teacher, and she helps her students experience the layered connections between ourselves and the world(s) we’re part of. I’ve always appreciated how she brings this awareness to everyday life — and together we shared it with our foster daughter.

As a philosophy minor in college (and before that a kid who read a lot), I’ve known intellectually that there’s more to life than what we can perceive on the surface, but for a long time, I never felt it or believed in any attempts to speak of the soul of things. In fact, I never liked the word soul except in referring to music.

I’m still not exactly comfortable with words like soul, but I’m more open to experiences that make sense to us as humans because of how they feel, not because of how they can be explained or what they represent.

If the weather was clear on the winter solstice, we used to have a fire outside and make beeswax candles on top of an old wood stove Trish keeps in her driveway. If it was rainy, we made candles over the gas stove in her kitchen. Our foster daughter became pretty expert at rolling the candles on a wooden board to make the outsides even and smooth.

It makes a deep kind of sense to me to bring light and heat into the darkest night of the year, as a promise of — or hope for — lighter days to come.

Our lives are often so removed from anything as elemental as a fire, but when someone builds one, it’s hard not to want to gather close to it and maybe roast a marshmallow over the flames or cook a foil-wrapped potato in the coals.

Thinking this way reminds me of a friend who regularly posts photos of the moon on social media, and in his photos, the moon always looks like its old self, but never looks completely the same. I like these kinds of opportunities to see things anew that are faraway and yet familiar.

I teach online and am often plugged into an electronic reality. I like streaming audiobooks on my phone and movies and shows on my TV. I wouldn’t even have met several important people in my life if not for the internet.

I’m not trying to self-criticize for my plugged-in life, but rather reminding myself that I feel better when I connect to a wider sense of time than the workday, to places beyond my desk and couch, and to feelings that depend on experiences like breathing fresh air or feeling a warm sun-break on a chilly day. I need more of a balance to feel part of something outside myself, to reach beyond the human self and into the world.

P.S. We don’t usually get much snow here, but I couldn’t resist a snowy winter photo to go along with this story. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, too, I hope your winter is pleasantly wintery and that you enjoy the gradual return of more daylight hours.