Mother Night

Dark shepherdess of many a golden star,
Dost see me, Mother Night?
~ From The Electra of Euripides

 

Hail and Merry Meet on this Eve of the Winter Solstice.
This is the great celebration of Mother Night.

As far as we know, our ancestors did not have atomic clocks or satellites to help them dissect Time to the nanosecond. Instead, they had to figure by their keen observation, by dead reckoning, by the plants and animals, by the stars, Moon, and planets.

And that is why they named this time “Solstice,” because it comes from the Latin “solstitium,” from sol, which means “Sun” and –stitium, which is “a stoppage.”

Check your local listings and you will see that for several days now, we have neither gained nor lost daylight hours.

For a brief time, it appears that the Sun’s arc from sunrise to sunset is unchanged. The long, steady darkening we have felt and seen, ever since mid-June, now stops… and then…. one day, our own dear source of life, will rise a little more to the north east, and the daylight will lengthen, little by little.

But not yet.

First, as She is now doing, we pause.

This is the time to give honor to the vast, deep dark that cradles us.

Mother Night is observed in honor of the Dark Goddess, who holds us at our beginnings and our endings. She may be Frigga, or Freya, the Cailleach, the Crone, or nameless. But this is Her doorway, after which the days of Yule begin.

In their beautiful book, The Winter Solstice, John and Caitlín Matthews write, “There is a moment of silence that occurs every year… a moment we have all experienced at least once in our lives, maybe more than once. It can silence a great city like London or New York, and it can bring stillness to our hearts, whoever and wherever we may be.

“That moment is like no other.  It offers the promise of new beginnings, of the clean slate of new year, and it incorporates the breathless expectancy of Christmas night itself, when a familiar figure enters our lives and changes them briefly.”

Do you recall such moments?  Times when you stepped out of the rush, and were flooded instead with quiet wonder? Have you ever gazed off into the Winter’s night sky, in search of a Star?

This pause between Dark and the return of the Light is an ephemeral moment, full of magic. Tonight, give yourself time to allow the delicious dark to fill your awareness.

Be with it, without fear, without the need to distract yourself. Notice how calm, how tender, how quiet it can be. This night can be a balm for the sometimes too hard-shiny-bright intensity that shuns this time of year’s true gift: its reminder of our own mortality, and the deep surrender of all things, even the Earth Herself, to times of darkness.

If you are keeping Solstice vigil this night, you might wish to light the fifth and final candle in your Solstice Sunwheel as the moment arrives (12:30 am Thursday, Eastern time;  9:30pm Wednesday Pacific).

Or you might wish to light it first thing tomorrow morning to greet the Solstice dawn, which brings the fulfillment of the Promise, the birth of the Child of Wonder.

But before that birth, enter now the dark quiet Mystery of this Mother Night.

May She bless you well.