Here is a memory from what I experienced of some deep magic in a former Winter Solstice ritual when I traveled with others into the spirit realm during a light trance, following the question “What is occurring in the magical realm of the Otherworld during the Winter Solstice?”
“Come with me if you wish...... Imagine I am slowly breathing this journey into your heart. And unexpectedly, although you are warm and quite cozy, a faint billow of steam rises from your body as I blow and it transfigures in the air into a shimmering confetti of frost. Follow that whimsical, sparkling path as it dances before you......
It is night. I'm walking on a thin carpet of soft, dry snow. I feel I've arrived at my natural home. The pulsing Earth under my feet reaches up to greet me in a song I hear through my blood. The loudest sound is my startled breath echoing in the velvet air like a capricious wind for I haven't been here in a long time. Yet, I am remembered. Surrounding me.... tall, dense conifers who now lean with interest slightly towards me, heavy with fat, silver icicles embedded with reflections of mysterious beings I can only see peripherally. My feet come to the edge of a forest pool. And then another. And then another. They are everywhere. Each pool has a thick layer of ice that at night has a shallow skim of water. I come to understand that during the day it is completely frozen. I wonder about it being warmer at night than the day and hear, in the susurrus of the listening air, that at night there is more that is hidden; more mystery, less to grasp onto and grind into facts. And so in this sweet darkness the Great Spirit of the Earth brings her face even closer to the surface and the rapturous warmth of her breath melts just a little of each night's icing. And so, here.... this shimmering liquid on each pond's surface and the fat icicles dripping.
I watch one icicle drip into the water covering the ice on the surface of the nearest pool. As the glimmering drop hits it sends out ever-widening rippling circles. As the perimeter grows, the ice within the circles becomes transparent and I see a face rise from below and gaze up with curious awe at this quiet winter world. It is a deer. I see other drops make other circles and watch other faces rise. There are different animals and human type beings all gazing into this world I'm walking in. Then another understanding comes: these are portals. And these beings are those who are going to be born into this world in the coming year. Their spirits come on this Solstice night in the forms they will eventually gather from the Earth in order to look into the world they will come to. It is the first, initiatory bonding that anchors their eventual incarnation. My face holds cold tears from the beauty of it.
Eventually I move from pool to pool to watch this magic continue. But then my path takes me out of the thick forest into a wide night field rimmed with shadows of great trees. The snow isn't deep but it is radiant, shining with a blue so intense it sends a reflection all the way to the sky which no longer looks black but a deep, plush indigo blue; the color sometimes seen just a few rare moments in the last dusk of the eastern sky. As I walk through this field it begins to snow. I see the snowflakes the way they look through an electron microscope. Each one so exquisitely complex and unique. But then I notice that from the end of each spoke on each snowflake there is a ray of colored light that streams out and connects with a ray coming from another snowflake so that every spoke on every snowflake is connected to others and this connection appears as a web of dancing colored light. This web is falling gracefully through the sky, through the air around me: a grid, a matrix, that lands over and over on the ground in mesmerizing patterns. As I watch, I once again come to an understanding: this grid carries information; energetic DNA that becomes part of the blueprint for all the life that will be born here. The web falling from the sky, in the form of our ancient Ancestors snow(water) and light(fire), impregnates the Spirit of the Earth with what is needed to bring the new beings into form. It is a snow of erotic incarnational magic, how the formless comes into form.
I keep noticing that there is myriad technical data about creation present if I were capable of retrieving and understanding it, but each time I try, I can tell I'll lose my trance state and be thrown out of the journey. For now, I'd much rather have the magical, hushed experience than all the information being presented and decide what I need to know will go in, whether I know it now or not. I stand there, breathing it all in......continually draped in a skin of prismatic light, enraptured.... until eventually the field fades and the drumming ends....”
The Winter Solstice is a gorgeous and powerful time of year for group or solo ritual as we fully honor and embrace the rich, fertile darkness before the calling back of the light. In emotionally sincere ritual there can be such joy to call on our Elemental Ancestors, to embody their gifts and experience consciously the great wonder of simply being a body full of light and breath, of blood and bone.
It’s also a propitious time to invite into circle your healthy human Ancestors who knew how to live and die well; to make room for them, to feed them with deep emotion, songs, stories, gratitude, respect, merriment, laughter and offerings of spirit food and libations.
And together with these most compassionate Ancestors, it’s a poignant and powerful time to send songs of reparation, of understanding, solicitude, and love to those ancestors who might be lost and confused, who haven’t fully received whatever is needed to become completely resourced as great helpers in spirit. Acknowledging them and taking responsibility for giving them what is needed to enliven their innate radiance is one of the greatest gifts you can give. It brings healing beauty and hearts of sacred fire to lineages that are often so fraught with the dulling burdens of pain.
The Winter Solstice beckons to connect us with the spirit of the Earth; to plant deep seeds of our greatest dreaming into the fecund ground. Attuning to the softness, the quiet and the darkness just humming around the edges of our bodies invites us to relax into peace. We can feel how sensually embraced and deeply held we are by the songs and amplified magic of the ripe, beautiful Otherworld, which responds wholeheartedly to our voices of love and praise.
So I hope wherever you are and with whomever and for whatever reasons you celebrate at this time of year, that you consider acknowledging the rich portal of the Winter Solstice and discover for yourself how the energies that gather when we come together to honor these ancient ways of being lead us more fully into our intrinsic nature with awareness and joy, thus bringing more of our gifts to share in this world.