To Pause

Tis the season of slow, quiet dark

Dear Friends,

I send you deep blessings in these holy days of Winter. This past year—and certainly the last six months—have been harried, hopeful, shattering, and breathless. We are all still recovering, recollecting, recalibrating, and refining our own centers, as the impacts of the US election ricochet through the country and the world

We are each doing this initial reckoning during the slow, dark, quiet time of the year. Tomorrow is the Winter full moon—and the Winter Solstice is a week away. This is a potent time in the wheel of the year, a time for slow, unseen growth and invisible change.

Before I share my essay, “To Pause” about this season of Winter, I want to let you know that the Hive Poetry Collective invites submissions from poets to apply to read at the “In Celebration of the Muse” poetry reading on Friday, March 21st in Santa Cruz. The deadline to submit is February 1, 2025. Women, women-identified, and non-binary poets are invited to submit. Poets can apply as long as they are available to read in person in Santa Cruz next March 21. See submission info.

Along with my essay, I’ve included a poem and photography as an offering in this holy time.

May this Winter season offer you the connections you wish, whether with your family, with friends, with the Earth, with your own soul, with your body.

Carolyn

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To Pause

Tis the season of slow, quiet dark

Tis the season. It’s winter here in Santa Cruz, cold and rainy—and to me this is glorious. I’m a winter baby and I love this season. I know that with the climate catastrophe, winter storms now regularly bring brutal floods, cataclysmic ocean surges and Category 4 or 5 cyclones. Atmospheric rivers of rain are predicted to fall in Santa Cruz all this season.

Still, I can’t help it. Rain makes me happy. It fills my soul. It fills the aquifers and drenches the plants; it waters our thirsty garden and nourishes the land. Not the least of it, rain reminds me of my wet and misty ancestral Irish homeland. Heavy rains fell much of last night in Santa Cruz, and hearing it was a kind of music.

There our other glories of this winter season. Tomorrow, Sunday, December 15, is the full moon—which will be bright and luminous tonight through Monday. That is, if the sky is clear enough to see it. But whether we can see it or not, we will feel it. It's stunning to consider that the gravitational pull of the moon affects the massive oceans, which cover almost two-thirds of our planet. But the highest and lowest ocean tides occur at the full moon and the new moon. The full moon certainly affects us humans, and we are, like the ocean, about two-thirds water.

So we will experience the full moon whether we can see it in the sky or not. If you feel restless and a little sleepless this weekend, the ancients would say this has to do with the full moon and her wild graces.

As it happens, this Winter full moon, according to astronomers and the Farmer’s Almanac, will also be in a “major lunar standstill.” This is when the Moon rises at the extreme northerly point in its cycle around the Earth—which happens about every 19 years. It’s called a lunar standstill because the moon appears to rise in the same place for two years.

Who knew about lunar standstills? I certainly didn’t—I simply could feel the gathering moon these last few nights and felt I had to look it up.

But now I know that this year the moon will appear at a standstill just one week before the Winter Solstice next Saturday December 21. The Winter Solstice is the time of year when the Sun reaches its southernmost point as the Earth journeys on its eliptical cycle around the Sun. The word solstice is from the Latin (sol or “sun") and (sistere or"stand still”), because the Sun appears to stand still in the sky during the solstice for several days—before beginning to rise ever-slightly to the north on the horizon.

In addition to the Sun seeming to stand still, as we all know the Winter Solstice brings great extremes of dark and light. Next Saturday, Dec 21 on the Winter Solstice, daylight in Santa Cruz will last 9 hours, 38 minutes. Half a year later on the Summer Solstice, June 21, daylight will last 14 hours and 42 minutes. That’s five hours less light just now.

We miss the Sun, and glory in it when it appears. But the universe, our home, is full of dark matter. We evolved to live in the seasons, to rest and be easy in the shorter days and longer nights. To pause our determined activity, to not try to harvest, to give over, to rest.

So in this next week, both the Moon and the Sun will appear to pause, to stand still in the sky. Perhaps even more than usual, as creatures of the Earth and of our solar system, we are called in this time to take a deep breath, to stand still, to truly pause. We are called to be easy, to rest our minds, to let loose our muscles, to sink into a blanket, to lay on the earth, on the sofa, in the forest, in the tub, by the ocean, or in our beds, and simply be.

This may appear to be unproductive, or even lazy. I assure you it is neither. As artists, poets, visionaries, thinkers and ordinary humans have known forever, rest and non-activity is the host of healing, insight, creativity, visions, dreams, and potentialities.

I have long been drawn to the term “Negative Capability,” first used by the 19th- century poet John Keats to describe the inspiration found in releasing the efforting mind to wander easily within our own inner world. I adore that he wrote of indolence as a necessary wellspring of poetry and creativity. Negative Capability, he said, was “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Yes. How perfect to be called to a kind of undirected, unplanned capability.

This kind of inner-being, without goal, creates the potential for deep rest and private listening, touching the deep self within. It is vital at all times in our lives, and all moments in the year, but particularly at this time of year, in this deep darkness, which calls us to it in a profound and physical way.

Sadly, even tragically, our culture asks the opposite of us this month. Things get frenzied. When other mammals curl up and rest, and plants go dormant for replenishment, our species lights up the skies and the airwaves with an overbright cheerfulness.

Part of the reason to rest at the Winter Solstice is that the light is surely coming. Literally, at the moment the Solstice is exact we are not only in the deepest darkness, but in an unseen way the sun is being rebirthed, for we will infinitesimally gain more light each day. This is organic, inescapable, and part of the rhythmic cycle in which we live. We can't stop the light from returning.

Decades ago, a friend who grew up Christian told me the obvious: that Christmas is essentially a celebration of the Winter Solstice, which has been marked by our ancestors for many millennia, honoring as both do the birth of the son (the Sun.)

In Ireland, our neolithic ancestors built the passage mound at Newgrange as a great acre-size astronomical monument to mark the rebirth of the Sun at the Winter Solstice. The passageway of this 5,000-year-old passage mound was engineered to receive the rising sunlight the morning of the Winter Solstice. I have a long history with this remarkable ancient solar monument, which I wrote about in this Substack essay.

Here is my prayer, for me, for you, for us, for our species: May we honor the fact of our breath and our bodies, and allow ourselves to follow the great spheres in our sky, the Sun and the Moon—and pause. Even in the too-muchness of life, in all the myriad busyness that we cannot magically turn off, may we find moments to let the darkness invite us to stop, to have no goals, to simply and only be.

May we let the organic rhythms of the season truly have its way with us: with our bodies, with our hearts, with our souls, with our minds. For all aspects of our being require rest in the fecundity and rebirth of the dark womb.

There will be plenty to do in the coming months, in the coming four years, in the coming decade. For now, may we make time to honor our animal bodies. May we focus on Beauty, and take long, deep, easy breaths. May we listen to the quiet inner voice whispering its own wisdom. May we know this is the time to Rest and simply be. The light is coming.

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On Breakfast and Rain

I’m happy today,
ripe avocado spread 
on warm toast with a dash of sea salt 
and a slice of apple.

There's a bit of blue in the sky,
after buckets of rain 
heaved last night
in never-ending waves.
It’s the first blue 
we’ve seen in weeks--
as rivers flooded the atmosphere
and set the winds to roaring
and the mud to sliding
and the trees to lift from their beds
and touch the earth with 
their highest branches.

Still it’s quiet at our house.
You're across from me 
in your morning spot
on the sofa by the window.
You slept well, had your breakfast.
We chat about friends trapped 
in their home by a fallen tree 
early this morning at 2am.
They’re safe for now.

Then you look up, 
your breath caught short,
tell me of a post from your
old friend’s brother.
And in that moment 
Michael's daughter calls you.
He’s gone, she says. 
He slipped away last night.
He was peaceful

You hold her, your goddaughter, 
in the big arms 
of your calm, kind voice.
You tell her how dazzling 
her father was, back in the day 
when you first met
and he was driving 
a Porsche, his hair long, 
a mustache, a few years older, 
and movie-star cool.

I watch a thin slice of sunlight
pour into the room
and onto your lap,
brushing the gray of your hair.
My avocado toast is gone,
my tea finished, the last 
of the sliced apple
crunches sweet sour 
in my mouth.
You gaze out the window.

So many are gone, you say.
So many, and I agree.

Still this morning
I can only think of this:
Your kindness on the phone,
the sky outside turned white again,
the winds picking up,
and I’ve eaten and you’ve eaten
and some day 
someone will get such a call
about each of us,
and we know this. But just now

I’m happy. I'm here.
There is the privilege of you.
Of breakfast. And rain.
And the sky.
The tall maple tree across the way 
remains upright. No trees fell 
on us last night. I’m happy.

---

Notes:

The Newgrange solar alignment will streamed live this year online, beginning at 8:40 am Ireland time, 12:40 am PST. You can also see a recording of the 2023 Newgrange solar alignment here.

The poet John Keats wrote of “Negative Capability” in 1817, in a letter to his brothers. https://mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Keats-NegativeCapability.html

All photographs by Carolyn Brigit Flynn.