The Return of the Light

The Winter Solstice on Dec 21, 2021

Happy Winter Solstice! On the day when the sun is at its furthest from the northern hemisphere, it feels like the whole world stops for a moment to reflect the past year and take a breather. It is difficult to believe it right now - surrounded by darkness, but from now on, the light of the sun is coming back into our lives. Minute by minute, the days are getting longer. In the times of uncertainty, it is comforting to think that there are things that can be trusted and that remain the same, such as sunlight.

Gratitude is the best spiritual tool in difficult times. We can be grateful that we have gone through at least a couple of rehearsal runs with the pandemic. All the precautions are already mostly in place, so we don’t have to start over. How grateful we can be that we were not immediately at the mercy of an aggressively spreading version of the pandemic two years ago - the world would look very different right now. How grateful (especially those of us living in wealthy countries) we can be to have food, medicine, vaccinations, entertainment and the internet which allows us to communicate with each other. We can only imagine how very different and how much more difficult it must have been to experience, for example, the Spanish flu - a highly dangerous pandemic that spread in 1918–1920.

The return of the light reminds us how grateful we can be for the small moments of joy, during our temporary adventure on this earth. We can celebrate solstice on a spiritual level with our ancestors - solstice has been celebrated in most cultures since the dawn of history. A wonderful reminder of it is the English prehistoric monument of Stonehenge where people still gather to welcome the sunrise during solstice (see the stunning photos of this year's sunrise). The sun always returns, just as hope does.

Wishing you a content holiday season,

Ursula

lunardakini@gmail.com.

www.lunardakini.com