Solstice
The longest night.
Welcome to the Winter Solstice, which is the shortest day and longest night of the year. Each day after the solstice, we gain a minute more of daylight. Or as my friend Deborah texted me earlier, “today is the day that the light returns.”
Rituals surrounding the Winter Solstice go back millennia, as disparate people celebrate the dark and the light. As humans, as a planet, we need both the light and the dark. Ancient cultures celebrated the turning point where daylight hours begin to lengthen again, which was seen as a symbolic rebirth of the sun and a promise of longer days and better growing seasons ahead.
I could use some better growing seasons ahead.
As writers, we experience both the light and the dark.
The dark days, when we don’t know what to write, when we think we’re wasting our time, when we wonder why we bother at all, help us to appreciate the days when the writing flows, when we reread a passage and think “I’m brilliant,” and when we finish that challenging scene with ease.
No matter what we think, or what others tell us, no writer has a good writing day every day. Let’s just say it’s statistically improbable. I know several writers who struggle to write in the winter darkness. Instead of thinking of this as some type of failure, we should respect the natural order of the world. Darkness gives us time to process, to think, and like the soil that during winter experiences a period of dormancy, we undergo important processes that benefit our growth.
I am coming out of a long winter with my writing. Studying Irish Literature in Dublin was one of the most expansive experiences of my life, but the culture shift of living in another country and the struggle to find housing put me into a state of overwhelm where I wanted to cave like a bear in winter—and for much longer than a single season. It took my long writing winter to normalize. I had to process the experience, the knowledge, and how it changed me before I could write fiction again.
My writing direction shifted dramatically, and that wouldn’t have happened without the experience, but more than what happened, I needed time to reflect. I needed the darkness. I needed to hibernate in order for growth to occur.
When we’re not putting words on the page, as writers, we feel like failures. Your writing struggles and blocks are different from mine and have a different source, but for all writers, it’s important to remember that this is but one stop in the cycle of our writing life. We cannot appreciate the highs without the lows; we cannot grow without the darkness.
Today is the day the light returns. It is the triumph of light over darkness.
Cindy Skaggs is a writer, book coach, public speaker, and military veteran who holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University and an MA in Creative Writing from Regis University. She is an advocate for military and veteran issues, mom to two humans, and an armchair traveler. In 2022, she moved to Ireland to study Irish Literature. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
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