Solas

Its just four o'clock in the afternoon. It is snowing and already quite dark. The days are so short now and it has become increasingly hard to get up in the morning. I'm a natural worker, I really enjoy what I do and take a delight in doing it well. There isn't less work to do just because it is mid-winter and natural rhythms are beating slow. There is a need to take care. To give thanks that I am able to do the work I really enjoy. To give thanks for a loving partner, gifted children and a beautiful grand daughter. To give thanks for friends. To delight in being able to return home tonight and sit by the hearth with a lighted candle and spend a little time communing with the Goddess.

Earlier this week I despatched some material I had designed and printed for the Goddess Temple. A small way of helping to support something I hold very dear. So many things have happened this year - most of them wonderful, the birth of a grand daughter, the marriage of a son, a visit to the Outer Hebrides. Some of them, not so good - breaking my femur and the long recovery. Though such things are a reminder of how dependent we are on the skill and care of others and how thankful we should be for the miracle of our bodies. Sadly I haven't been able to visit the Goddess Temple since January and I am missing contact with the sacred space and friends. Hopefully the New Year will see personal contact renewed.

A dear friend took the photo above while in Cornwall last week and sent it, "with great love, thoughts and good wishes for a gentle season of Christmas and Solstice and Yuletide and New Year and anything else you think of celebrating". A beautiful reminder that soon we arrive at that still point known as Solstice when the sun pauses in the sky before beginning the long climb north. If we didn't know in our bones that in six months it will be light for over 18 hours day we might hardly dare believe it. But it will be so. All will be well and all manner of things will be well.

The same is true of Copenhagen. As always the so called leaders falter and fall. But we give thanks for thousands - if not millions - of ordinary people who really do care for the future. In the word of Desmond Tutu, “We marched in Berlin, and the wall fell. We marched for South Africa, and apartheid fell. We marched at Copenhagen - and we WILL get a Real Deal.”