O Sun, do not desert us (Dancing around ancient Solstice fires into the Now)

Do you hear the ancient drums throbbing inside your limbic brain?

Do you hear the cries of long-dead ancestors as they dance around the Solstice fire begging the sun to return? Please come back, please come back, please come back, they sing desperately as drumbeats meter the earth with fervent prayer.

O Solstice song deep in our limbs! Latent fear coursing through blood’s rising tide. Will Sun return? Will we shiver in frigid cold the rest of our days, slowly dying because the gods withhold their pleasure? Will darkness envelop this world of blood, death, caves, sacraments? Will we live to kill another buffalo or rhino to feed our hungry children?

O Sun, do not desert us. We will do whatever you require. Do you ask sacrifice? Why do you punish us? What have we done wrong? (We list our known grievances: I treated my wife poorly. I ate that rabbit instead of sharing it with hungry neighbors. I slapped him. I yelled. I forgot prayers.)

I failed, O Sun, I failed, and you shroud the world in darkness.

I will try to do better.

I am so sorry.

O Sun, hear this prayer.

Dance, dance, dance around the roaring sparking Solstice fire, all ye ancient ones! As the cold moves closer in, as you shiver, as the dark spreads its black wings about to obliterate everything good and known–

Just when you think it won’t return, that your prayers are worthless rubbish, that the cold will douse the last fire–it happens.

With a hush, a lull, a moment where the Holy obliges, takes His staff, waves it from His universal perch and the music of the Universe swells in absolute delight–

The sun returneth.

The sun returneth!

The Solstice light drenches the heart with joy.

Spring will come, won’t she? Summer arrive with berries, wintergreen, sweet honey, ostrich eggs! We’ll swim in the River Jordan, won’t we and grow warm and fat in the sun’s blessing.

All is well in the world, sayeth the limbic brain and we hear the glad good news how many thousands of years later as we sit in our heated homes with Christmas lights awaiting the holy-days celebrations.

In the Holy Now we look again. Evolution sang its sweet good news that the world is held–yes held–by the arms of invisible gravity and seasonal cycles and tilts of an obedient sun just when it reaches its maximum orbit at the North or South Pole. Science declares the glad good tidings that the Universe runs according to mechanical and physical laws.

The ancient footsteps around the fire entreating “save us, save us!” are no longer needed. Not only did science arrive with its patterned knowledge, we humans graduated from a punishment/reward system as the Christ consciousness illuminated our understanding.

Christ came humbly to share that something exists beyond our good and bad deeds. Belief in the Holy is what’s required, sayeth he. You are saved if ye just believe.

Believe in what? Believe in something more than slaps, kudos, bad girl, bad dog, good boy, good baby. Something more than our deeds steers the ship in stormy seas. Something more than our human conditioning. Something more than a limbic brain that begs for salvation because it’s so scared, so traumatized, so frightened.

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The Old Testament with its terrible punishments and revelations springs open to an awareness of eternal innocence. An awareness of something larger than itself. This is the second coming. This is the wide-open gift of the Solstice return. It’s not something you earn. It’s given, dear one, it’s given. Science winks. Jesus nods. The One God with its many faces cycles in its labyrinth again, and we need only notice the miracle of it, the utter miracle of it.

Is there another miracle not yet seen? A miracle that may just be birthing now? A miracle you and I may glimpse in our lifetime, if we’re lucky? A miracle that can only be discovered in this very “now moment”–this right here, 12/21/2020 minute you’re in right now–as the sun tilts its angle back into our heart:

The world swims within a Universe held together by the invisible glue of love. Oh you disbelievers, I so love you. Oh you believers, I so love you. This is the place where you surrender to what IS. This is the place where you drop into the Holy knowing you’ll be caught, knowing you’re saved, knowing nothing was ever wrong except your understanding. (And even that wasn’t wrong, it was just limited, like a babe learning to crawl before standing upright on two shaky feet before sturdiness settles in.)

For everything that still seems wrong and terrible and disappearing and sad–we can rest with that, too, without closing down, without hopelessness, while simultaneously shining like a triumphant sun, warming all the closed-down places, softening, ripening, birthing, cracked open like an egg yolk in a winter sky and shouting, “HALLELUJAH!”

Day 65 of a seventy-five day journey to connect more deeply with God, Spirit, Holy, Love…to explore “What the Heart Knows” during the waning days of 2020.