Happy Winter Solstice

Stepping into darkness and light

Good morning! Happy Sunday. Today at 10:03am EST is the exact moment of the winter solstice. What will you do in that moment? What will you do this evening? On the darkest day of the year, we celebrate light, and so we can have our own private celebrations, our own personal festivals of light, and this can mean anything we like.

Solstice meaning:

The shortest day of the year (winter solstice) or the longest day of the year (summer solstice). During the solstice, the sun appears to reach either its highest or lowest point in the sky, so ancient astronomers referred to the solstice as the day when the Sun appeared to ‘stand still.’

The word Solstice derives from the Latin word ‘sol’ meaning ‘sun,’ and ‘sistere’ meaning ‘to stand still.’

It’s still early, so this morning I will have my coffee, I will take a shower, washing away the worries and chaos of autumn, and then I will light a candle and step freshly into winter, ready and able to take on everything.

I have a lot of work to do today, and this evening at 5pm is our annual solstice celebration at Elizabeth Street Garden, so I am excited to be there, to see the twinkling statues and tree branches, and to share our completed community poem, hearing all of our voices through the speakers in collective harmony as we ring our silver bells.

‘On the darkest night of the year, we bring light, and on the quietest night of the year, we bring sound.’ - Joseph Reiver

‘Today is the first day of Winter, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and also the longest night. The most seemingly un-illuminated day of our year. Today is also called the ‘hibernal solstice,’ when living things (including us) might be drawn to settle into their space of hibernation, to hunker down and rest during the coming weeks and months of frigid cold. Bears will go into hibernation, and other animals, too - groundhogs and hedgehogs, turtles and snakes, bumblebees. Plants. It’s the commencing of a time of serious sleep, deep restoration, preparation and recovery for the future.’

In this post from 2023, I shared some different options of journaling exercises to do at the mark of the solstice, and today at 10:03am I will spend some time with this one:

1. Picture yourself alone and still, in the quiet dark of night. You look into the distance and see that dawn is on the horizon, a soft glowing light appearing slowly. You move towards the dawn, and suddenly, you see yourself - there in the future, and you feel so happy and excited to see where you’ve arrived in your life, how you’re feeling, what you’re accomplishing. What is it that you see? What are you up to there? What is different about you out there in that light of dawn compared with here in this moment now?

This fits perfectly with the feeling and momentum of today. As Rose Theodora stated in her post this morning, ‘this solstice is different.’

WHY THIS WINTER SOLSTICE IS DIFFERENT

’There is so much hype around Solstice—celebration, ritual—but in truth, it’s about containment: a pause before re-emergence or rebirth. Since the Autumn Equinox — we’ve been in a period of undoing—reckoning with consciousness, alignment, and how we strategize and take action.

Solstice doesn’t arrive as a solo event. You’ve been doing the work to get here—turning inward, shedding old layers. Some of us feel more alive in the process; others feel destabilized without light or assumed certainty.

We are closing a numerological Year 9—a year of completion, release, and reckoning. Year 9s demand discernment: what is finished versus what remains unresolved. Capricorn season acts as a bridge between closure and initiation, preparing the ground for 2026, a Year 1—a year that requires ownership, agency, and action.

Capricorn asks: What can you sustain?’

Rose asks us in her post, ‘what can we sustain?’ And she actually does ask us to approach it a bit differently than in previous years or than I visualized above, but we can shift the point of view of our journaling to match this.

‘This Solstice is not about vision or goals for the future, but about taking inventory of what remains standing after a long cycle of dissolution.’

So what do we do?

She says,

‘What you’re building now is not from nothing, it’s a structure for an entirely new terrain and experience.

This Solstice is a quiet recalibration of internal authority where:

• illusions lose energy

• endurance becomes visible and felt

• responsibility becomes clarifying and even inviting, rather than heavy

For the final month:

• Reduce input. Less information. Fewer commitments.

• Review the year without judgment. Rather than dreaming up new manifesting goals, ask: What endured in 2025? What didn’t?

• Strengthen one structure in your life—the Capricorn part of your chart and life, as well as the Pisces part: sleep, finances, boundaries, time.’

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So with this in mind, let’s reimagine those journaling words and the visualization I shared above:

1. Picture yourself alone and still, in the quiet dark of night. You look into the distance and see that dawn is on the horizon, a soft glowing light appearing slowly. You move towards the dawn, and suddenly, you see yourself - there in the future, and you feel so happy and excited to see where you’ve arrived in your life, how you’re feeling, what you’re accomplishing. What is it that you see? What are you up to there? What is different about you out there in that light of dawn compared with here in this moment now?

What are you sustaining in that visualization? What are you bringing forward from 2025 that endured? What are you leaving behind? When you imagine your life in the future, when you see yourself more happy, more light, more free, how did you get there? What did you leave behind, how did you simplify in order to achieve this peace and freedom within?

‘The Solstice has always been a moment to pause and check in with yourself. People have marked this day for centuries as a reminder that light and darkness both have their place. Today is an invitation to slow down, take a breath, and ask yourself what you want to carry forward into the next season.’ - Moonomens

There is a lot to feel proud of on this winter solstice. Let’s find that glowing light within us, the flickering candle that will continue to warm us and lead the way as we walk forward into winter, into this close of the year, and boldly into 2026, alive and ready for anything.

In Omnia Paratus. <3

Happy Winter.