Winter Solstice

Darkness is gathering along the rim of the hills to the east; light spilling from the heavy grey cloud that has sat hunched, arms crossed, along the Downs all day. To the west, at the head of the valley, a thread of silver light, trapped between black clouds and the dark green of the hills holds the last of the day together. The wind is blowing from the west and carries the smell of rain and something sharper; cold and earthy.

I am standing in the middle of my bottom field, just inside the chicken run. In the wood above me, the rooks are settling into the darkness gathering amongst the ash and sycamore that straddle the lip of the hill. The startled cry of a blackbird breaks from the brambles that trail along the base of the slope that climbs up into the trees. There are splashes of rain, and I turn the collar on my jacket up. I have ducks and chickens to feed and shut up for the night, plants to cover in case it turns cold, a polytunnel to close. I grab the chicken feeder and water drinker and head towards the shed where the food is stored.

Slowly, a huge pale grey-yellow moon rises from behind the sloping stubble field that lays behind me, and lifts through the bare, dark outstretched arms of the apple tree that stands beside my vegetable shed. It climbs on a soft bed of black cloud up into the evening sky and hangs above the darkening ground below, spreading pale yellow light across the sky around it.

The wind lifts across the field as the shortest day of the year slips away into the dark line of the hedgerow. Night, the longest night of the year, rolls off the hills.

We have arrived at mid-winter, the point at which the earth’s axis is tilted at its furthest point from the sun. Tonight, is the turning point of the year as the sun reaches its southernmost point in our hemisphere, pauses, and begins its trek northwards again across the sky.

Tonight, is the Winter Solstice. Tonight, is special; has always been special. Special for those who live close to the earth and its natural cycles. Those whose lives depend upon the weather and the seasons for survival. Hunters, gatherers, farmers, fisherman.

Special, for early Neolithic settlers on the island of Orkney, who almost five thousand years ago, created a burial mound, a chambered cairn, at Maes-howe on a flat, windswept finger of land caught between loch and sea. They carefully aligned the low, narrow entrance to the main chamber, to catch the rays of the low December sun before it sank below the horizon. Evidence suggests that they placed a standing stone at the entrance to the tunnel. They also erected a solitary monolith known as the Barnhouse Stone to the west of the cairn. On the day of the Winter Solstice the sun sets over the top of this stone and its last rays go on to illuminate the darkness of Maes-howe’s inner chamber.

Like their descendants who, two thousand years later built the stone circle at Stonehenge, they would have gathered as the day faded and darkness grew and stood in the silence of that burial chamber to wait for the moment when the last dying rays of the sun ran down the passage and cast light across them and their dead.

This was the turning point of winter. It was a promise. Light would grow again, the earth would warm, seeds would germinate. Those rays of light, down the passage, between the standing stones, bought hope.

But why is the Winter Solstice still special? Why do I pause and take a last look at the dark sky locked against the hills before I start for home? Our lives are divorced from the natural world and its cycles. Outside the temperature has dropped to freezing but the room is warm. We buy, we do not grow the food we eat. We are surrounded by things we have manufactured for our comfort and pleasure, we are cocooned from what is on the other side of the window, cushioned from the hardship of the weather, oblivious to the seasons. We no longer see ourselves as part of the natural world, of its cycles and its seasons. We believe we are in control.

Perhaps, we need a reminder that we are just one tiny speck in a vast, complex, symbiotic whole; that we are part of the same cycle as our ancestors were, that we are bound by the same laws of nature as those early Neolithic settlers on Orkney.  Perhaps we need to stop and stand and watch the sky as the longest night begins; to feel at one with what is around us again.

Then maybe, just maybe, a shift will take place in the way we see our place in this world because we have badly screwed up. As a species we have become too greedy. We have ransacked this planet we depend on, used its resources for our own ends, taken, but given nothing back, forgotten that we are not the only species living here, refused to acknowledge that our way of living is unsustainable and in pursuit of our own mean, selfish ends have become too clever for our own good.

On this eve of the Winter Solstice we are standing in the shadows and staring into a different darkness. Our future and the future of everything that lives on this world, is balanced on a fine knife edge. And I am talking run-away climate change here. A disaster of our own making. According to eminent scientists we have ten maybe fifteen years to turn things around, to ensure there is a future for our children and their children.

We need action, determination to do this. We need to put the planet first and ourselves second otherwise both of us will perish. We need to change the way we live dramatically. We need to make hard decisions, sacrifices in order to survive. We need to realign ourselves with the earth on which we live and we need a ray of light coming down a narrow passage way into a darkened chamber. We need hope.