As we tilt toward the solstice, I’ve been thinking about how deeply this moment resonates in our psyches.
On Standing Still
“Solstice” comes from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). For a few days each December, the sun appears to pause at its lowest point on the horizon before beginning its gradual climb toward longer days. The light hesitates. The year holds its breath.
Long before clocks or astronomical charts could pinpoint the solstice, people recognized this moment with a bone-deep attentiveness. Early winter was often a time of relative abundance: the last of the harvest stored, animals slaughtered so they wouldn’t need feeding, beer and mead finally fermented, communal food at its most plentiful. And yet everyone knew that the hardest months still lay ahead. The solstice held that double truth: a turning toward the lengthening light, and the beginning of the long winter.
On Light and the Turning Year
Across millennia, people shaped rituals around this turning. In Ireland at Newgrange, and in Orkney at Maeshowe, stone chambers were built with passages aligned to the single sunrise at the solstice. All year those rooms sit in darkness; on that one morning the sun reaches deep into the earth. The precision, the care, the sheer effort of such alignments tell us something about the weight this moment carried.
In northern Europe, the time around the solstice gathered the name Yule—possibly from Geola, “the yoke of the year,” or the Norse Jul, tied to the turning wheel. Feasts stretched through the dark days, great fires burned on hillsides, and offerings were made for blessing, protection, and luck. In some traditions, a place at the table was set for ancestors returning in the cold months. Fire served as signal, warmth, remembrance, and celebration.
Dreaming in the Catskill Mountains
Here on the land where Spillian now dreams, peoples of the Haudenosaunee, the Mohicans, and the Munsee Lenape lived, traveled, traded, and marked the turning of the year in their own ways across shifting generations.
Among the Haudenosaunee, the solstice night carried a distinctive shape: families went to sleep early, deliberately, to dream. Dreaming was understood as a way of moving between worlds—between the visible and the invisible—and the dreams that rose on this night were taken seriously. At first light, the community gathered. Elders, adults, and children spoke their dreams aloud. These visions were then enacted, discussed, or brought into the life of the people. Meaning was something created together.
A Time of Myth-Making
These very different traditions—stone aligned to a single sunrise, winter fires burning across northern hills, a longhouse filled with people listening to one another’s dreams—share a similar recognition: the solstice is not merely an astronomical event.
This was the time for myth-making and deep story, for celebrating the power of gathering together to share both food and meaning, and for strengthening the bonds that help carry the whole community through the deeper cold to come.
Openings
from our Catskills Solstice Yule Spark Quest
A couple of ways to begin to open into the stillness of the solstice, that can start your attention toward the turning of the year, and be a quiet preparation for the revels ahead:
Welcome a Moment of Seasonal Light
Choose one moment this week to invite the returning light.
You might:
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hold your face to the last rays of a short day
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light a candle and let it invite you into the flame
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stand outside and listen to the snow fall
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let the dark be generous
Listen for What Lifts
Notice a moment that makes your psyche feel a bit of lightness, like:
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a line of a song
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a memory that emerges sideways you
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an unexpected thought
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a rush of of hope
Happy Yule. May the light return.
