December seems to consist mostly of work. Not in a bad way, just in a there-doesn’t-seem-to-be-enough-day-for-anything-else sort of way. The feeling is not helped by the interminable darkness of midwinter. Like every year, I seem to have forgotten just how little daylight there is around the winter solstice, or rather, before it because, as soon as the year turns, I believe that I notice every single minute of additional light. The advantage of a strong imagination, I suppose.
On the 22. December, the day of the solstice in Europe, Berlin saw a mere 7 hours and 39 minutes of daylight. Six months earlier, in Edinburgh, the day stretched on for almost 18 hours, allowing for an early swim under the rising sun, a nap, a wander through Glasgow Botanic Gardens and then a long evening with my feet in the sand, watching the sun slowly fade into the distant hills, as people sat gathered around fires on the beach. I spent the winter solstice nowhere near water but instead with dear friends under an indigo sky at a Christmas market, drinking mulled wine and telling each other how glad we were to be together and it was perfect exactly as it was.
In December I also seem to have gotten out of the habit of wading into my freezing lake. More often than not, I chose sleep over getting up and heading out but the few times I did, I immediately remembered why I love it so much. It’s painful, yes. It’s uncomfortable, yes. And sometimes it takes hours to warm up afterwards but it also makes me feel incredibly alive. I no longer need the water to get through the day but instead it serves as a reminder that there is more to life than work, that there is colour to be found, even in the depths of midwinter.
“They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places
Colour can be found in any number of ways, even in midwinter. On the Sunday before the solstice, the evening sky alights in pinks and magentas and all over the internet, people in Berlin seemed to have turned their heads and phones to the sky to witness it. Later that same evening, I watched the recording of a concert of one of my favourite bands. The band member’s faces shone with the delight of doing what they love, of sharing their art, while the people in attendance sat in reverent silence, mouthing along quietly, until the last song when the band invited them to belt out the lyrics. “For I’m so scared of losing you and I don’t know what I can do about it,” they sing together, a whole church full of people, and isn’t that what we are all afraid of? Losing someone we love and being unable to stop it.
The world over, as people gather to celebrate Christmas, to eat vast quantities of food, the people in Gaza are losing the people they love and if they haven’t died yet, they are on the verge of starvation, and politicians aren’t unable to stop it, they are simply unwilling, or so it seems.
“To be in a position of being able to ignore the reality of what this system does and continues to do is to be wholly complicit in it.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection
I have long loved the solstices but in the dark of the long winter of 2020, I began to read more about it, about how people used to bring in greenery and light and the believes attached to it. The twelfth days following the winter solstice, when the sun seems to stand still, were believed by the Celts to belong to neither the old nor the new year. It was an in-between period, a liminal space of time.
There has been a lot of writing this year about this in-between period. Writing that I’ve found at times comforting and at times unsettling. As much as I love this quiet, dark liminal space of time, I also find it quite uncomfortable to think that we in the West live in so much abundance that we even have days to spare while there are people who have so little and people who are bombed out of their homes.
As midwinter draws me in, I allow myself to wake with the rising of the sun, or rather with the subtle shift from dark to lighter grey. I also find myself waking for “the watch”, a long period of waking in the middle of the night, something that Katherine May describes as “a very special part of the day, a quiet time […] free of the pressures of work or social life”. Whenever I wake in the depths of night, I can never quite get myself up to make a cup of tea or read, like she does, but I don’t berate my brain for waking either. Instead I let myself enjoy the silence and for a few confusing nights in a row, I listen to the sad song of a bird outside my window. A sound so at odds with the darkness.
Anna Brones describes the solstice as “a moment of pause, a moment in the darkness.” The last four years and maybe especially the last few months have all felt dark. The pandemic was dark for all of us but then it was supposed to be over and most were trying to get “back to normal”, whatever normal was or is. But I’ve long felt like the pandemic has marked us more than most are willing to realise. The overwhelm, the feeling of being at the end of our tether might just be a sign of burnout or post-traumatic stress. Or maybe it’s a sign that the world we used to call normal was extractive and harmful all along.
Now I am no expert, so I use these words with care but how could that time not have traumatised us? Many have lost loved ones and we all lost time and the version of our life that we had envisaged at the beginning of 2020. At the very least, we should have taken the time to acknowledge and to grief our losses.
Some part of me hopes that the popularity of books like “Wintering” and the sudden interest in the solstice means that some people realise the need to slow down. We can retreat from the world. We can grief and wail at the injustice of it all. We can even get angry. The world will still be there when we return.
And it needs us to return because an even bigger part of me hopes that these past few years have been a bigger kind of liminal space, an uncomfortable, maddening in-between time between the old world and a new one, a better one. A world in which we are more aware of the cycles of nature. A world in which caring for others is valued more highly than the accumulation of monetary wealth. A world in which every human earns a living wage and is treated with kindness irrespective of their skin colour or belief. I hope that all that we are witnessing is just the old world singing its ugliest swan song before it leaves for good.
“Wintering… is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
New Year’s Day dawns sunny at first and I head to the lake. The night was filled with noise and the explosions of firecrackers but now the city is quiet and there is hardly a soul to be seen. As I walk into the water, ducks chatter, somewhere a heron calls and while I stand, breathing away the cold, a swan flies past, the beat of its great wings audible across the water.
This year, Europe will elect its next EU parliament and the US its next president. The UK might hold a General Election and New Zealand might hold a referendum as divisive as the one in Australia this past October. We need to act on climate change and we need to do it fast. A war wages on. People die in droughts no one actually hears about. Politicians and keyboard warriors seek to divide us every day. And democracy is under attack.
My wish for 2024 is that we all turn more towards the world than we turn away from it. We cannot solve the problems we are facing if we are not willing to face them. Nothing can be done if too many of us assume that someone else will sort it out. If there is an election this year where you are, whether local, national or transnational, go out and vote. Talk to your families and friends beforehand, listen to their concerns, point them towards reliable information and motivate them to go out and vote as well. Too many elections are decided by the people who think they cannot make a difference and so stay home.
And because I spent New Years Eve reading old New Year’s Wishes by Neil Gaiman, I will leave you with this:
“So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we're faking them.”
Neil Gaiman, New Year’s Wish 2012