On the Winter Solstice, we gathered at The Eco-Institute to share warmth, light, and prayers
for our world at this time.
Our dear Gary Phillips offered a beautiful call & response style prayer, which is reprinted below per community request.
Our dear Sarah Haggerty also offered a prayer,
to which the people responded with echoes of agreement.
We recreated a simple, beautiful ritual called the Spiral of Light, which symbolizes the return of the light. Each community member takes an unlit candle into the center of the spiral of evergreen branches, where they light it from the central candle. Each lit candle is then brought out and placed along the spiral, expanding and spreading the light.
We sang together; songs of light and peace and joy.
As older, nature honoring cultures have known, the darkness is a powerful time to honor.
And so is the return of the light.
This was such a beautiful nature-connective ritual, we plan to make it an annual community tradition.
We hope you will join us!
Prayer by Gary Phillips
Reader:
Let us all stand and say “Welcome the Light!”
Together the people say:
“Welcome the Light!”
Reader:
On Solstice we hang in the balance. Like Mother Night we have been made pregnant by the Great Darkness and now we sit in vigil to birth the waxing year. If the sun agrees to return it will be 14 seconds earlier than the day before, holding like a tiny seed the promise of summer.
We welcome the ancestors into our circle; we welcome in our community and spirit the whole of creation around us, the earth that sustains us and the stars above, the creatures of the field and wood.
Together the people say:
“Lady of the Wild Things, we honor you.”
Reader:
Now that the leaf cover is down, bears and groundhogs and eastern chipmunks have dug into their winter sleeping lairs. Noisy flocks of crows and blue-jays and robins gather at the margins of fields. The winter forms of the Hop Merchant Butterfly have drunk their last drop of the year’s sun and rest in diapause. Tiny screech owls are calling from the woods on still nights and soon yearling bucks will lose their antlers.
The forest floor is bright with winter’s light and now subtle magic greens appear: rattlesnake plantain, wild ginger, partridge berry, running cedar, pipsissewa. We are entering the orange cast phase of the Eastern Red Cedar, when the tiny brown cones begin to color and prepare for February sex.
Not only conifers have color; look at the evergreen angiosperms: our hollies and groundsel trees and native magnolias. There is still fruit hanging from the tree and vine in December; catbrier, sumac, mistletoe and the winter buds of witch hazel. Winged elm and maple are about to swell and break dormancy and enter into the great dance of procreation.
Together the people say:
“May we too break dormancy, and prepare to bloom.”
Reader: Let us mine the darkness and welcome the Season of Light, Saturnalia, Dionysia.
Above us Orion chases the Daughters of Atlas across the sky. Solstice tells us that none are safe unless all are safe. We must be about building communities of resistance and resilience, shelter the goddess, stand for the right.
May our words of power congregate and fly like the winter visitations of brown creepers and hermit thrushes; our juncos, our chickadees, and white-throated sparrows.
Let us kindle our fire this solstice in the presence of all the holy ones…
Without malice, without jealousy, without envy,
But with the presence of the holy fire to empower us and inspire us.
Together the people say:
“May there be kindled within us this Solstice Night
A flame of love to our neighbor, to our foe, to our friend, to our families,
to all the children, of every species, everywhere and forever.”
Reader:
And so it is. Blessed Be. Amen.
Special Thanks go out to Andres, Hope and Tana for their help at this years Solstice night.
Contact us if you would like to be a part of creating community events like this at the Eco-Institute in the year to come.
