Winter Solstice is a unifying holiday, and for me it sits at the heart of this season. Regardless of what and how each one of us celebrates, part of what we’re all celebrating are transitions: endings and beginnings that give us a chance to mirror nature. Winter Solstice, though it marks the shortest day and the longest night, is also about balance: holding equal appreciation for darkness and light and remembering that because of one, the other is more palpable.

The days around the Solstice mark an opportunity to stop a little more fully than normal, allow for rest, and rejuvenate through remembrance of what we hold dear. It can also be a time of crazy busyness if you let it. Consider this post as encouragement (provocation?) to take the opportunity to reflect. Honor darkness and interiority so that your outward light can shine with full vibrance.

With that intention, I offer some favorite prompts for you to use as you wish, plus a poem I have found worthy of multiple reads.

Wishing you and all those you touch the fullness of the season…some time to gaze into the flame and rekindle your spirit from the fire within.

• What are you ready to let go of, lay down, stop doing, burn away? What is it time to end?

• What is one way you are different than you were in 2010? Are there ways in which you have grown younger, even as you’ve aged, in the last 10 years?

• Looking back on this year, when was a time you felt vibrant and fulfilled? What were the circumstances? What could you begin in order to foster more of this?

You Begin
Margaret Atwood

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.