21st December. 4pm.
As the light fades the wind growls around the woodland at the top of the hill. The trees stripped down to their dark winter branches lift into a black angry sky. Behind them a thin slice of light sits along the hill top waiting to be eaten by the darkness and the wind. There is rain in the air and the ground is sodden.
It has been raining for a hundred years and my boots slide in the mud as I walk across the field to feed and shut up the chickens and ducks. Night has gathered at the end of the valley; the hill dark against the sky. To the east, I can see three tiny points of red light on the top of hill. Radio masts.
The days begin and end in darkness. Slipping out of bed in the dark, groping downstairs to the kitchen to put on the kettle for that first cup of tea, the dog still curled in his basket with one eye half open. Short days that vanish as you turn around. Jobs outside left undone as the daylight slips away. Four in the afternoon and I slip a torch into my pocket as I close the greenhouses and begin the evening ritual of feeding the poultry and making sure they are safe from the fox that scouts along their fencing at night leaving behind that pungent fox smell that hangs in the morning air.
By the time I finish the last of the light has seeped from the western sky and I am surrounded by darkness as I head for the field shed guided only by the light spilling from its open door. It is time to go home to the warmth of the kitchen. Time to cook supper.
The nights are long, broken only by the sound of rain on the windows and wind catching at the house. Wild, untamed, looking for a way in.
This is Midwinter. This is the evening before the Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the year. The longest night. The point at which the earth’s axis is tilted at its furthest point from the sun. This year the actual moment of the Solstice will happen around 4.19am this morning. (It has turned midnight as I write). I will be curled around a duvet, fast asleep hopefully and tomorrow will last a mere seven hours and forty-nine minutes. And then the world will shift.
For thousands of years our ancestors have celebrated the winter solstice. From Neolithic settlers at Maes-howe on Orkney five thousand years ago to their descendants at Stonehenge two thousand years later, people have gathered together, surrounded by darkness to wait for the world to turn, for the light to return. This is part of the history that runs through our blood. So, some of us today still gather, pause, and mark the turning point of winter. We can still look into the darkness and see a promise, a promise that light will grow again, that the earth will awake again, and that the seeds we sow will germinate.
We live in dark times; our world, our planet on the edge of huge changes. We need to stop and look into that darkness, face it, take it and turn it around, find the promise that the light will grow again, that the earth will recover, that the seeds we sow now will germinate for the future.
So a happy Winter Solstice. May the light grow again.
