Winter Solstice: The Time of Turning
Frigga, the Earth Mother, the Norse Goddess of love and marriage, weaves the clouds with her spinning wheel. She’s responsible for the wind and the rain and the snow and therefore the crops and the food and Frigga could see the fates. Frigga was worshipped by all the ancient peoples of the North and was the beloved wife of Odin, The All-Father. She was known as a 'seer', one who knew the future though she could never change it.
As a seer, Frigga saw her son’s fate. She saw that her son, Baldur, whose name means Shining One, was going to die. Baldur is the God of the sun, the light, the one who brings life and warmth to Earth. Frigga could see the future but she had no power to affect it. Baldur’s death came to pass. The malevolent trickster Loki fashioned a dart made of the poisonous plant mistletoe and, in a cruel trick, placed it in the hand of Baldur's brother Hodor who was the God of Darkness, and offered to guide his hand while teaching him to shoot darts.
And so he did, guiding the arrow directly into Baldur's heart. Baldur was shot with a spear made of mistletoe and the Light died. His body was burned in a huge fire. Frigga couldn’t bear the loss of her son, so she impregnated herself by eating berries from the mistletoe and gave birth to him once again. The sun was reborn. Frigga is so grateful that she made the plant a symbol of peace and love, promising a kiss to all who passed under it.
Theirs is the story of the Winter Solstice. The light dies and Mother Earth brings him back again. Of all the holidays celebrated by humans, the solstice is likely the oldest. It’s a magical season marking the journey from dark to light, the turning of the year from the end to the beginning. The year is reborn accompanied by festivals of light to mark the rebirth of the Sun. In ancient Europe, this turning of the darkness was credited to Frigga who sat at her spinning wheel weaving the clouds, watching the fates and birthing the light.
We are entering the Winter Solstice. Daylight has given way to dark. Sunbathing and outdoor dining and open-air theatre are things of the past and the future. These are the days of hurrying from place to place wrapped in heavy coats and faces covered in scarves, of dutch-oven stews, and the feeling of nighttime settling in each afternoon. We have moved just about as far from the sun as we can get, plunging ourselves into days of cold and dark as our planet revolves and rotates in her magical, mysterious orbit.
Long before people were tracking our own history, we were celebrating, or at least acknowledging, the winter solstice. People, wherever they were, noted the turning of the season. The daylight is at its briefest and the nights are not only long, they are very dark. For some, there is no light at all these days, with the sun barely breaking the horizon even at the peak of daytime. The northern pole is leaning away from the sun so that everyone north of the equator, which means 90% of the human population, is living with these long nights and shortened days. For us, there are about 9 hours of light this week, 16 hours of dark.
Solstice is the time of turning. We are about to experience the darkest, longest night of the year, and although we will then begin to add seconds of light back, our experience for some time will be that of darkest winter. Then, in a month or so, we’ll notice that it’s no longer dark at 4:30, and in February it might even feel like spring is on its way as evening is pushed even later. Our planet turns and we along with it. Spinning faster than we can imagine, and obviously faster than any of us experience. In the day to day-ness of life, it all feels very slow, as dark descends and takes hold.
We are here, on the cusp of what’s next. Our year is ending as light reaches its lowest point. Each day we lose another minute of light as we get closer to December 21st at 10:27pm when the shift begins. That will be the darkest point and the next day, the light will return, at first just a few seconds at a time. The darkness is ending. Frigga’s mourning is soon over. We see the return of the shining star. Later this week, the hours of sunlight begin to lengthen and the fates are woven and new possibilities are imagined. Mother Earth is laboring to give birth to her son, the Shining One.
I have hope for the turning. I am of the belief that we are in a Great Turning, an epic moment in human history. We can see the last vestiges of a culture dying, an industrial growth society that’s reached the end of its effectiveness. This happens in human culture. We evolve. We change. There is a turning.
Twelve thousand years ago, there was an agrarian revolution in which people domesticated animals and plants. They learned that hunting and gathering could be shifted if they planted their own food and raised animals near their homes. This shift led to a massive alteration of human culture, allowing us to let go of nomadism and settle into homes and communities, thereby increasing life expectancy and expanding human culture.
It’s happened again and again through history with the solidification of world religions, the introduction of math, great scientific discoveries, important inventions, and new ways of thinking, each bringing an evolution, a conversion from what used to be into what happened next.
The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century created one of these definitive transformations. Things formally made by hand in the home were now made by machine in a factory. Human lives were never the same again. There was a dramatic increase in population, tremendous growth of towns and cities, in education, transportation and massive immigration and exchange of cultures altering the course of human evolution.
And we are, again, at a moment of turning. Earth can no longer sustain our appetite for consumption. The industrial growth economy that requires demonstrable growth in every calendar quarter, demands an incessant and unceasing stripping of natural resources from Earth. The transition we’re seeing is from an unsustainable economy to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of our world.
In the early stages of major transitions, the initial activity might seem to exist only at the fringes. Yet when their time comes, ideas and behaviors become contagious: the more people bear witness to their inspiring perspectives, the more these perspectives catch on. At a certain point,
the balance tips and we reach critical mass. Viewpoints and practices that were once on the margins become the new mainstream. We begin to see people organizing to move society toward a shared vision. Language that was used only by a select few is heard in everyday conversation. Average people begin to push for a new vision as norms shift and expectations for ideas that seemed far-fetched become realized.
We just saw this happen at the United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai. I won’t go into the details, but the whole thing was feeling doomed. Then it changed. For the first time ever, the world’s leaders agreed to phase down - or maybe out - fossil fuels. This is momentous. In 2015, the fight was to recognize that increased temperatures over 1.5 degrees was catastrophic. Each year, we move closer to the possibility of being able to address climate change meaningfully, but never have we said out loud that the cause of the problem is the burning of fossil fuels. Never. And in a million years I didn’t think that was going to change in Dubai, nestled in the heart of oil-land, during a conference whose president is a climate denier and the chair of a Middle Eastern oil company. But, it did. There is a turning.
The culture we’ve grown used to is ending. We can no longer consume resources the way we’ve become accustomed. We can’t deplete Earth of all her resources for our consumption or travel tens of thousands of miles a year. And as these concepts move from the fringes into mainstream awareness, many people, millions of people, are grasping at whatever they can reach to keep it alive. Slogans like Make America Great Again, reach backwards to a fictional past as a last gasp of a dying culture.
This is the path we follow. When the Industrial Revolution was taking hold in this nation, elections were rampant with anti-immigrant, racist rhetoric. In 1856, 75% of the House of Representatives was made up of what were called Nativists, people who today we’d call White Nationalists. And in 1860, the Civil War broke out and culture was transformed. There was massive change in the Industrial Revolution. Culture was altered permanently. People were terrified. They tried to hold on to a world they knew they were losing. And then, there was a Great Turning.
We’re watching again as fascism rises and democracy shows signs of strain. This is fear trying to ossify in our political and social systems. It’s how we respond to change. When culture turns, when one world dies and another is born, people afraid of change wield all their power to stop the turning.
In the current, charged atmosphere, I hesitate to even nod to the metaphor of light as good and dark as bad. There are dangerous implications in the ways we’ve embedded that language in our culture, and the increase in racism we’re witnessing makes me even more sensitive to it. But in this particular turning, this winter solstice moment, I’m making an exception and I hope you can make room this time for the metaphor.
Earth is turning again. We are in the last days of the old age, the days when Loki is aiming his poison at the light, hoping to burn out the sun. Frigga can see what’s coming, and in her grief, she will birth the light once again.
I suspect, in this moment of Turning, we all have the potential to be Frigga and Loki and Baldur and Hodor. Identifying with Baldur is easy. He’s the bright light who falls victim to someone else’s misdeeds. Loki wants trouble. He doesn’t like the way things are going and wants them to stop. He wants the world to stop turning, for things to stop changing, so he lies and manipulates to get what he wants. There might be people in the public arena who remind us of Loki.
Hodor isn’t paying enough attention to know what’s happening. He thinks Loki is teaching him something about spears and doesn’t realize the mistletoe is poison or that hitting his brother will have fatal consequences. He goes along with the plan, mindlessly. There are lots of Hodor’s around.
And then, there’s Frigga. She can see it all. She knows her son, the Sun, will be killed. She grieves his passing as any mother would. And then she uses all her power to transform that loss into a new birth. She creates life where there was death.
This is our call; this is our task. We are Frigga. We can see what’s next, and we are making ourselves ready. We are living in the dark, in the cold, in the waning days of the year. But the solstice is coming. Earth is turning. This is a time of Great Turning, a time of transformation, the end of the old and the beginning of the new.
This is the Winter Solstice. We count down the minutes. Night extends. Cold descends. And then it turns and the new world is born anew.
