From ancient times, our ancestors from all over the world marked the seasons of the year with Earth Festivals. They used nature for healing, survival and knowledge, and celebrating the Earth Seasons with festivals was a way for the community to renew itself and its bonds with nature. The festivals deepened the peoples connection with the earth and the sky. All of nature, the sun, moon, stars, trees, crops and animals were included in the celebration. Every person felt his and her connection with the Source of all Life.
Modern scientific thinking says we cant influence the sun. In The Dancing Wuli Masters, Gary Zukav in explaining the New Physics, Quantum Mechanics and the Wave Function, revises this thinking He states:
If there were twenty-five possibilities in the wave function of the photon, the wave function of the measuring system, technician and supervisor similarly would have twenty five separate humps, until a perception is made and the wave function collapses. From photon to detectors to technician to supervisor we could continue until we include the entire universe. Who is looking at the universe? Put another way, How is the universe being actualized?
The answer comes full circle. We are actualizing the universe. Since we are part of the universe, that makes the universe (and us) self actualizing.
This sounds very much like the belief system of our ancestors. They believed that the Sun, is not merely an object up in the sky; instead, the changing relationship between the sun and the Earth is the foundation of all life on Earth, and we are positioned between the boundary of the ordinary and the non-ordinary world. We play a part in maintaining the balance and the health of the Earth, the Sun, and their relationship, therefore, we play a part in maintaining the balance and the health of all our people and all other living beings on Earth.
Winter Solstice is the celebration of the relationship of the Mother and the Father. It is the celebration of the birth of the Source of all Life. It is the celebration of the feminine energy, Mother Earths tremendous capability to handle the masculine energy of Father Sun and bring forth life. Winter Solstice is the celebration of the knowledge that the Ancient Ones express in common with Lewis Thomas, a pathologist.
Thomas in The Lives of a Cell writes:
Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos....It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun....When the Earth came alive it began constructing its own membrane, for the general purpose of editing the sun. She breathes in a certain sense providing cycles of oxygen production carbon dioxide consumption, depending on the relative abundance of plant and animal life....We are protected against lethal ultraviolet rays by a narrow rim of ozone. ..Taken all in all, the sky is a miraculous achievement. It works, and for what it is designed to accomplish it is as infallible as anything in nature. I doubt whether any of us could think of a way to improve on it, beyond shifting a local cloud from here to there on occasion.
For when Mother Earth developed the membrane, it was possible for her to developed all the stages of life and bring forth the many different living beings we find here on Earth.
Through the years, Western Industrialized Civilization has belittled the "Indigenous people" who celebrate solstices to balance their relationship with the Sun and Earth so that life will continue. Now we know how delicate this balance is and that we do have a role in the relationship between the Earth Mother and Father Sun. Now that we are beginning to understand the damage we can do by continuing to ignore our influence on the Earth/Sun relationship and balance, we need to find a way to restore our relationship with these greater powers.
Dolores LaChapelle in Talking on the Water: Conversations About Nature and Creativity, says,
If were going to rediscover a viable relationship with nature, it will not be through more ideas but through experiences where you know you are part of nature, with no questions asked. When you've had these experiences you know what you want and you cant be pushed around. We can find our way to more of these experiences by following the wisdom of other cultures who know that their relationship to the natural world requires the whole of their being.
The Celebration of Winter Solstice is a beginning to discover our relationship with the greater powers. Winter Solstice is an old festival. History places its beginnings at about 7000 b.c.e. in the Egyptian Mythology of the death and rebirth of Osiris who is both a solar God and a vegetarian God. He is known as the divine child and the prince of peace. This mythology is probably much older dating back into prehistory. The death and rebirth of the Sun God is found in Greek, Roman, and Celtic mythology who celebrated the return of the light and the birth of the Divine Child at the Winter Solstice. Norsemen celebrated the birthday of their Lord, Frey in the darkest days of winter known to them as Yule. This tradition is continued in the Christology, where early in the 4th Century c.e., Jesus of Nazareth's birthday was placed on December 25, and he became the light of the world and the divine child.
On December 22, the Sun will come up and move across the sky and the days will began to lengthen. The Sun will shower the Mother with energy and nourishment, and Mother Earth will Create:
The air, the water and the trees
The forests in turn will die to make coal and oil.
She will create all the plants and the animals.
She is the air we breath, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the house we build for shelter.
She gives birth to life, to spring, and to hope.
She gives birth to the divine child in each of us.
The time is December 21. The year is present. We have gathered in Traverse City Michigan to celebrate the Winter Solstice. Men, women and children are dancing around the fire and sliding in the snow. We are waiting the coming of the dawn when the Great Mother will once again give birth to the Divine Child Sun, the bringer of hope and promise of spring, life, and peace.
We will assist her by adding our berthing energy to hers. In an altered state of consciousness, or non ordinary reality, we get in touch with our feminine self, and birth the divine child from within ourselves. We form a chain of men and women legs that will make up the birth canal. Three persons acting as midwives will receive us and welcome the divine child the new us into the world.
We assist The Mother on this Solstice Day. We enter an altered state of consciousness and we go deep into ourselves and connect with her, and in so doing, we connect with the creative potential of ourselves, the potential of who we really are. As we birth the divine child, we discover our soul's purpose or why we are here.
And we understand that we have the capability of sustaining and supporting all life on the planet. We are her children. We are part of her, and all that is in her is in us. We cry out to her, to deliver us, to nourish and love us. We cry out for Mother Earth and Father Sky to fulfill who we truly are - to fulfill the promise and capability of the human species for hope and the renewal of life.
It is my turn to birth the divine child, This shouldn't be hard, I think to my self and I get down on my belly and I start through the canal.
The men and women who make up the birth canal, are going to make the berthing hard. They will grab my feet, hold my head and shoulders, squeeze my sides so I cant get through. They represent the barriers that society or I put in the way of my becoming. But they also represent the contractions that push me towards the birth.
I get half way through the birth canal, and I realize This is hard. I am not sure that I am going to make it. I rest, and I hear the soft voices of the midwives, urging me on. Their hands are reaching for me and they pull me out. They rock and cradle me while softly singing lullabies. In their supportive arms it comes to me,
The Divine Child is going to make it. The Sun is going to rise tomorrow morning and the Great Mother will go right on producing life, regardless of what us humans do. She may decide that humans were a bad experiment - that we are not good for life. We don't know how to handle our destructive self. We are to her like the microscopic organisms in our eye lashes are to us. We can be life giving/supporting or we can be the disease. The decision is up to us.
Mother Earth will survive. She will clean herself of our pollutants, and she will continue to create. She is providing us the resources to become the creative species we are capable of becoming. She is calling us to life and to renew ourselves, to renew our communities and to renew all her children on Earth.