Thoughts on the Winter Solstice 2020 (by Tom Hirons)

Here we are, at the solstice, then. Me, I'm weary and dazed. Who is not weighed down by the year just past? Who is not looking to the future with trepidation?

I don't know what's ahead of us. We slip further into the chaos of ecological desecration. Covid. War. Corruption. Foolishness of all the wrong sorts.

But, this is my solstice news: whatever shape your life has made, you have the right to joy in this world. Whether your road to here has been one of sweet delight or not, you have a right to joy. Sometimes it will take years, but sometimes it happens in a moment. The tower falls; the pain rings out in your body; the voices all around clamour for attention; the needs are always too many... And yet there is the possibility, as everything breaks around you, of joy.

One day, perhaps soon, you will be dead and all your joylessness will have been for nothing. Do not waste the chance you have for joy and find yourself at death's threshold, suddenly awake as you die.

I live my life with one eye in the gutter, soaked in darkness, in the belly of a bear; my other eye observes the light from stars both near and far, and sees a world of radiance. I'm not going to hide the bad news: there is so much that is terrible & broken. But, in the midst of this inferno of a life, here is a doorway.

In the still moment of solstice, I'm standing in that doorway, with my hand reaching out. Come through.

Yes, everything is burning. Yes, disease and poverty and the trauma and grief and all the bloody shame of so much life and love wasted, yes. All of it. Oh, it burns. If I could cast a spear or a stone into the eye of that which makes it so, I would. I cannot, and no one that I know can.

But, I know one thing: This joy in the dark is the antidote to the crippling despair, the one that eats us when we've gone beyond grieving. All the demons tremble to witness it, because it cannot be undone or broken or sullied. It is the stuff of heaven, and it is your birthright.

Here I am, then. Standing in the doorway as the timbers and tiles crash around us and the fire billows and roars. Come through. Risk it. Step forward.

What the hell have you got to lose?