December 21, 2008, What is the Winter Solstice

What is the winter Solstice? It is the midpoint, or mudhya, between turning inward toward autumn, and outward toward spring.

Hello and happy Winter Solstice. I'm snowed in here in Portland, Oregon. It's part exciting and part scary. The adventures of the last ten days have been a bit of overwhelming at times, and I have had trouble putting it all into words. Or more accurately - I have had trouble figuring out how to pare down the sheer number of words into a decipherable offering. But I'm working on it, and there should be at least one or two new things to read in the break before The New Year.

So yes, the winter wonderland is in full effect here in the Northwest. All across the northern plains the weather has been extreme, in many places much colder and snowier than here in Portland. But eight inches (!) of snow is an unusual situation here, and we lack the civic infrastructure, not to mention the individual know how, to go on with business as usual. The streets are not plowed. We're basically snowed in.

Funny, I've felt a bit reluctant to write about the weather, to call attention to conditions that I know will seem relatively mild to so many of you. But it's like in an asana, for example a forward bend. It's how one person may be able to bring their head all the way to their knee, while another may not even be able to sit on the ground without props, but both persons are experiencing an opening, and it's the opening that counts. It's much colder in Montana than it is in Portland. In the midwest this would be winter as usual. But believe me, the weather here this week is blowing my mind right open.

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What is the winter Solstice? It is the midpoint, or mudhya, of the season. The western hemisphere will now begin its movement toward longer days and warmer weather, and a more outward inclination on the part of the plants, the animals, and the humans that live here. If nature draws inward in the fall and winter months, and extends out again in the spring, then the solstices are the focal points.

As a pose to represent this time of year, I choose downward dog. Down dog is doable in some form for almost every body, it is part forward bend, part back bend, a gentle inversion, and a powerful strengthening pose, making it as varied in scope as the seasonal traditions and ritual celebrations of solstice time, and also as universally appealing and challenging. And down dog is a sort of matrix in and of itself - a pose from which and into which so many other poses flow. It, too, is a midpoint, a mudyha.

The energetic focal point in down dog (the mudyha of the mudyha), is the heart, and it is here, at the heart, that we land on the date of winter solstice. Winter solstice, and the myriad cultural celebrations that have grown up around it, is the heart, the hearth, of the year. It is the connecting place between the muscular actions of the cooler seasons - drawing us inward to behold the divine as she resides within, and the organic extension that is prevalent in the spring and summer months - the reaching out across the web of consciousness to celebrate the divine as she is reflected in all of the many forms around us.

This is the first Christmas of my married life. We will not be visiting with family this year, as finances and now the weather have made travel impossible. But this gives us an opportunity to fill our own home with colored lights, and the smell of things roasting, and the warmth of a celebratory glass of something, well, spirited. I'm not sure whether the ritual festivities of winter are meant to celebrate the fact that we are once again moving toward light, or to show us the light, the tejas, that can be found in the darkness itself. Either way, from my heart I bow to the light within all of you.

om namah shivaya

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