Every year, I forget that today, the solstice, which teeeeechnically kicks of the winter season, offering us the shortest daylight of the year, is also the beginning of the light coming back.
Every year, I forget that while the weather gets colder and bleaker, the light is in fact, slowly and steadily, returning.
We're smack in the middle of Hanukkah, a festival of lights, a beacon of warmth, coziness, hibernation food, and survival. This year, I see each candle less as a comfort in the bleak but rather a harbinger, a reminder that light has already begun to return to us here in the north.
It may always be beyond me that winter actually only starts weeks into real winter.
I will try to remember that winter itself kicks off the return of the light.
from New Moon Newsletter No. 23