Winter Solstice Prayer: Honoring Magic, Reality, and Rebirth

I hope you’re doing well, keeping safe, wearing a mask, and finding seasonal joy in the pockets in between.

For me, this time of year, from around the Solstice through to the Epiphany has a feeling of sacredness. It’s the time-out-of-time where we can rest, dream, celebrate, and plant the seeds new dreams for this coming cycle of the year.

This year is no exception. I’ve felt the spirits, deities, and ancestors I work with close by since the Gemini full moon last weekend. I’ve been working rituals of observation, tending, and care, noting the omens, dreaming and listening. Letting this sacred space remake possibility to be born in the new year. It’s wonderful. It’s magical…

And, yet…

It’s isolated. It’s an island of enchantment in a really desperate fucking time. The people in charge in the US continue to put people at risk, to treat disabled folks as disposable, to do everything but what should be their express responsibility as people in power in a government. Tests are hard to come by; my partners are still working in-person at jobs that refuse to require everyone to wear masks; stories abound of overwhelmed hospitals; I won’t be seeing any family nor even the small pod of dear friends I’d opened my life to. This sacred moment of magic out of time is directly juxtaposed by the brutal reality of this moment. But I don’t think that discounts the importance of the magic. The magic sustains me, gives me hope, buoys me in re-imagination of possibility, keeps me dreaming of a better world.

This morning while journalling and trying to hold the enormity of both the magic and the horror of this moment this prayer came to me. It is the prayer I will offer around the fire this holiday, and, I offer it to you, too:

“May this magic hold us, protect us, infuse us, remake us so that we may weather the storms to come.”

So often hope seems like a denial of reality. This prayer is not that. This prayer is the hope that we can hold both the truth of reality and the seed of hope that blossoms with in so that we may create better. This is what I hope for myself. It’s what I hope for your. It’s what I hope for the collective.