Savoring Solitude and Silence

The root of the word solstice comes from the Latin solstitium "point at which the sun seems to stand still," This will be my last blog prior to the Solstice, possibly my last until the New Year. 

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I love the velvety darkness this time of the year,  It invites me to reflect.  It invites me to go deep within. And in the often frenetic pace of life (Seriously, how are we essentially three weeks away from 2024?) the silence is such a relief.  In this moment I feel like I can breathe deeply.  The vastness of this space, this enfolding velvety darkness, opens into nothing but gratitude.

We need both the light and the dark. The Solstice is a time when light and dark are equally balanced. 

In our charts, the Sun and Moon are the lights.  The Sun is the light of the day and the Moon is the light of the night.  The Sun is the giver of life and the Moon is our home.  Our Sun shows the path forward and our Moon illuminates our past, and our needs.  The Sun is steady and visible as it sharts its path across the sky mirroring like our experience of daily life.  During the daytime, we can fairly easily see the outer landscape.   The Moon is ever-changing and not alone in the night sky,  when we view the stars we can imagine multitudes of worlds just as there are multitudes within us. 

I feel blessed to live in an area that cherishes its dark skies. The night sky is ever-changing and breathtaking. Years ago, a friend of mine visited me from a major metropolitan area on the East Coast in mid-winter.  I picked her up at the airport in Phoenix, a two-hour drive from Sedona.  We had dinner and began the journey north, and up Sedona is 4500 feet, and as we crested the hill on the highway reaching the Colorado plateau she broke off mid-sentence and began exclaiming “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”  She was awestruck by the vibrance and beauty of the night sky and couldn’t even complete her thought in the moment. 

We are losing our dark skies, they are being swallowed up by artificial light.  So many are afraid of the dark whether literally or metaphorically.  This speaks to our fear of the unknown. In this ill-defined place, we most often feel as though we cannot get our footing, that we are not on solid ground.  There is a lack of trust of our place within it as we can’t clearly see. As a result, we feel the need to flood our inner sky with artificial light.  

To avoid our discomfort, we will flood ourselves with food, alcohol, sex, busyness in the guise of productivity, or some other form of pseudo-light that habitually serves as a pacifier when we don’t know how or are afraid to look deeply within. I am sure you can name your own poison, I certainly am all too familiar with mine. The brilliant Taylor Swift captures it perfectly in her song Antihero: “I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.”

We habitually run from our most primal relationship, the one we have with ourselves. 

Yet, the more we practice savoring periods of both solitude and silence, making it a priority within our lives the more we are able to connect with our own vastness.  The more we embrace our darkness, the unknown frontiers within, we come to understand that it can hold us, cradle us in its womb, and nurture us into a new life.   

We need both the light and the dark. The Solstice is a time when light and dark are equally balanced.  Celebrate and ground in this singular moment of your life as we move into the uncharted territory of 2024.

This Solstice I am overflowing with gratitude.  Thank you all for the attention, curiosity, and support you have given me.  It has opened me in ways I could not have imagined three years ago.  

In the New Year, I will begin offering a free astrological social hour over Zoom.  Many of you have reached out with brief questions after reading a blog and because of this, I have been inspired to create a place of community where I can answer questions allowing you to explore your charts more deeply outside of a class for those not quite ready for that but who are curious or simply wish to listen and explore.  Astrological Social Hour aims to create a space where we can have fun talking amongst ourselves and explore the ‘stars.’