For Light

As an earthbound being, I feel the solstices very deeply in my body. It wasn’t always like this though. Growing up, my family didn’t celebrate this day and I didn’t even know it existed. When my mother became more attuned to Chinese cultures about a decade ago, she realized its importance and started to gather the family together in celebration. Four years ago when I started to live in the “Eden Valley” and with deeper intimacy with the land, my body has been continuously adjusting to its natural cycles.

For the past 7 years, around December and solstice time, my body always gave me grave signal of what she needs and what has been neglected. One year in Taiwan, in the midst of organizing a Soundpainting workshop for an international teacher and a local New Year festival, I suddenly had a huge flare up on allergies. I woke up one morning and couldn’t open my eyes because they were inflamed. Another year, after three months of training and preparing for a physical theatre show, I caught covid on Christmas Eve. My body was always the most sensitive during this time and found its way to ensuring that I was alert of it.

This year, the 7th year, I had finally learned my lesson. Although I am in the midst of a busy construction period and preparing for a show, I am carving out time for quietude and deep rest. To listen to the earth and what it is doing…

I am pausing as She is…and I am called forth to graciously remember the cyclic nature of all things and that all life on earth turns to light. Before physically turning outwards towards the light, we need to gravitate towards the inner centre of the wheel. Resting, shedding, hibernating, yielding…

Here, I am aligning with the moment of Earth’s pause, listening to its stillness, feeling its stillpoint.

The wheel of life offers us eternal movement, uncertainty, and understanding.

But first, we listen and emerge from the light held within. May our thoughts be of true light and our actions be of numinous light.

I wish you a blessed solstice, celebrating the rebirth of the sun and the numinosity it beholds.

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.”

- T.S. Eliot