After a particularly ugly night of un-sleep, I woke up to a gray morning. It looked how I felt. I was hungry, even though the stomach was still reeling. I sat in a gray scoop chair and looked out the window onto the pine forest and rocky slopes. It is the day after Solstice, and the Light returns. I feel like it’s slowly coming back in my life, too. An intense feeling of relief, gratitude, love, and beauty flooded my being. I felt, feel, truly content.

I wonder at times what happy is. What is “happy?” There’s laughter, and joy, tinged with the sense of mirth. Is that happy? I wonder if happy is this ethereal state that we strive for, in our American culture, where we’re not content until we or the people around us are “happy.” Can we settle for content, or even blessed?

I was thinking about the split personality of the year. On Solstice proper, I was thinking of Cernunnos, the Celtic God of the forest, fertility, the underworld, wealth, animals, and wildlife. Wildlife. I dove into reading about him as I was looking at the Solstice ceremonies performed for thousands of years. The two horns of Cernunnos may depict the two sides of the year, full of darkness or full of light. Involution and Evolution. Doyle walked in while I was thinking about all of this and said, “Did you know that the pause in the amount of light and darkness, that three days at the Winter Solstice, did you know it only occurs in Winter? There’s no visible “stop” in the Summer Solstice. It makes sense if the Summer is about evolving and the Winter is about involving. It’s reflective, soft, contemplative, passive, yin, black. It’s the snow fall and hush of the trees. It’s beauty overwhelming.

This romp through the linguistics of the name Cernunnos took me to Proto-Indo-European language forms, and into Dis Pater, the god of the underworld, where we are spending these three days until the Light returns. Dis Pater is thought to come from Dyeus or Dyeus Phter, the chief deity of the Prot-Indo-Europeans. He was the god of the Daylight Sky, a mirror to what occurred on Earth; the Sky Father. The name is etymologically linked to Jupiter, Apollo, Zeus, Zio, and also known as Akasha. It is most likely the Roman who split Dyeus Phter from its original roots into Sky Father and God of the Underworld. What better way to banish an old religion than to banish it to the darkness?

By the time the Rig Veda was written, Dyeus Phter was already old. It predates written history in thought and form, and it has permeated through so many human cultures that it most likely a faint copy of its original splendor. I think of the Silmarillion when I think of this. I think of the beginning of the light found in the beginning of the world and how, over time, it was a faint copy of the original. The archetype is lost and only a small seed remains of the original light. It’s bright and beautiful and yet, so faded. Perhaps we can only slightly comprehend what the original meaning was. Yes, I think about all these things. I think of what we’ve lost, and what we’ve replaced it with in our culture. It’s the big things that stir in me during Solstice.

I think about being “happy” and laugh. How thin a mindset is that? I think about what we’re becoming, and how to be in this world better than we are. I think these three days of involution are just fine and perfect, if we use them correctly. If I use them correctly. It’s a short window from which to plant the right seed in fertile soil. In Cernunnos’ hand. Today we walk up the road and down, to visit neighbors, to embrace the snowy silence of a forest waiting. It’s waiting for the Light to return, as are we all. Perhaps that is the better question to ask: what is Light? What will I do with the Light that returns and how can I bring it back to our modern age? Perhaps it just starts with me. Perhaps that is all I can do. I will not wish for peace because I think that is futile. I will not wish for happiness because that is fleeting and unsure. I will wish for Light evolving. It seems to me to be in sync with what the Earth is already doing.

-TDD