One perspective common to most of the belief systems that fall under the umbrella term of Paganism is a desire to connect more fully with the natural world. There’s a recognition among most Pagans that Western culture, as a whole, has slipped too far from the cycle of the seasons and the interconnected web of existence. Indeed, treating the natural world as a resource to be exploited and viewing the lives of our non-human neighbors as meaningless and expendable has resulted in a world in turmoil. We’re seeing die-offs in species, climate-change related disasters, and more. The anthropocene has a deep shadow.
We’re so sheltered from the natural world now. The modern miracles of electric light and climate control mean that the patterns of our personal lives don’t shift dramatically when the winds of winter arrive. And that’s not all bad – I am personally grateful that I do not have to spend my entire day tending a fire to ensure that my home is warm enough for my family to survive winter.
However, as sheltered as we are from the elements, we carry a pattern in our shared human history that includes a natural response to winter. For many thousands of years, humans who lived in regions that include a cold season changed their behavior and day-to-day activities in response to the season of snow and darkness. The transformation of human habits from being seasonally anchored to effectively trying to act like it’s always summer is relatively new. Electric lights weren’t standard in homes in the United States until the 1920s. We’ve had about a hundred years to adapt to a different way of handling winter and it seems like a lot of people still struggle with the shift. Deep ancestral patterns helped our species survive. They do not fall away easily.
The good news is that there are ways to thread the needle between our contemporary lives and the ancestral pull to curl up by a warm fire. One of the most useful tools Pagans bring to winter is perspective-based. When we’re trying to maintain summer schedules against early darkness and the discomfort that cold can bring, it’s easy to view winter as a nuisance. But in the Pagan worldview, winter is the season of blessed darkness. A holy time when the land itself becomes simpler. The leaves of the trees fall, revealing the underlying structure of trunk and branch. The undergrowth in the forest goes dormant and we can see more clearly the literal shape of the earth where we live – the stones, streams, and rolling hills of our region. Even the colors simplify, shifting to a palette of brown, gray, and muted green against the clear blue sky.
Pagans see an invitation here to follow the example of the world around us. This culture tends to be so busy now, and so distracted. Winter presents us a chance to pause and explore the underlying structures in our lives. It’s an opportunity to take a deeper look. Just as we can see further into a forest in winter, if we allow some of our distraction to subside, we can take a deeper look into our lives.
The literal darkness supports this as well. We have such a cultural aversion to the dark here in the United States. It manifests in serious ways like our cultural inability to openly discuss death and dying and thoughts about mortality. It manifests in ridiculous ways, like the fact that black cats and dogs are harder to find homes for. But this sweet, blessed darkness of winter is a gift. It forces us to sit with the unknown and with the greater mystery – that all life begins and ends in darkness. Many Pagans view this season as one of gestation. Of seeds sleeping deep beneath the snow. It’s worth asking ourselves what is slowly shifting for us, or growing for us, in the darkness. It’s worth asking ourselves if there’s something we’re running from or trying to avoid in the dark.
This practice of winter self-reflection even aligns fairly well with the yearly calendar. As we wrap up one calendar year and prepare to begin the next, it’s a good time to evaluate: what relationships are actually helpful? What patterns and practices truly support you? Where are you just going through the motions in life and is that what you want, or would you prefer to make changes? We won’t really feel more light in the days to come until we’re much closer to the vernal equinox. We welcome the return of the sun at Yule, but true light and warmth is still pretty far off. There is an opportunity here to root deeply into the rhythms of winter and use this time to heal, grow, and learn.
There are a few techniques that help support this approach to winter. One is a technique we call Winter Work. Winter Work is an area of study or focus that unfolds over the course of the dark season and wraps up around the vernal equinox. For some people, that means developing a skill or knowledge base, but for many Pagans, Winter Work is deeply personal. It’s an opportunity to journal, reflect, and dream. To embrace the season of sweet, blessed darkness as a chance to focus on who we are, what we want, and whether our lives are serving us. This reflection period is an opening to course-correct if needed. This approach to Winter Work is supported by different things depending on what fits the person in question: a fresh journal and pen, collage supplies to create a vision board, a selection of items for a point of focus in the home, or simply time spent in the evening without distraction in order to sit with one’s thoughts.
Another technique for winter contemplation is the selection of an intention word for the coming year. An intention, in this usage, can best be described as an overall goal or theme for a year. By narrowing our ideas down to a single word, we can often gain clarity on what in our lives needs transformation or better support. Those of us who use yearly intention words have a few different techniques to support the practice: displaying the word somewhere prominent in our homes, choosing a photo or image relating to the word to use as the background on our media devices, developing some goal statements related to our intention, and establishing designated check-ins over the course of the year to see how the intention is playing out. As you wind down the remainder of 2024, think about what overall theme might serve you best in 2025. Words I have worked with in past years include Manifest, Nurture, Shine, Courage, Root, and Choice. All ended up being good choices that supported the year they were selected for in interesting ways.
Ancestral connection can be a useful thread from the Pagan tapestry of winter practices. Many of us find great resonance through learning about and connecting with our ancestors. Ancestral connection can include recent family ancestors but also our broader culture of origin. By learning more about where we come from, we can imitate some of the rhythms and practices of what we understand our ancestors’ experience of winter to have been like. For our ancestors in regions with cold winters, life moved indoors. Subsistence farming was how most people lived and the needs of the agricultural year were the focus of the warm seasons. Come winter, daily work moved into a smaller, heated space. This meant handcrafts of many kinds: creating tools and furniture, mending clothing as well as objects, fiber arts like knitting, weaving, and sewing, and the creation of art – songs, stories, gifts and more.
Our ancestors speak to us not only through our physical traits but sometimes through aptitudes and skills. My maternal grandfather wasn’t very communicative as I was growing up. The best word to describe him in those years is probably “grumpy.” He didn’t have a lot of patience for children, so we didn’t communicate much. Toward the end of his life, he softened and became a kinder and more easygoing person. One thing that he began to do was tell family stories that I hadn’t heard before. His grandmother came from a family that practiced medicine. Unfortunately, during my great great grandmother Caroline’s time, the mid-1800s, women did not become doctors.
My generation is four women, close in age and all in our 40s and 50s now. Out of the four of us, two became yoga teachers largely due to a fascination with movement and how bodies function. One quit a very lucrative investment job in order to become a nurse. One reads medical articles and goes to exhibits on the human body for fun.
None of us knew about our great-great-grandmother Caroline’s family ties to the practice of medicine. I kind of wish we’d been told since I think a couple of us would have just gone into the field from the get-go. However, it’s a wonderful illustration of the quirky things we can inherit other than the color of our eyes. We commonly assume that descendants who follow in the career paths of their ancestors learned their skill through nurture whether that’s blacksmithing, baking, sewing, or even the practice of medicine. It seems that sometimes these skill sets and aptitudes are just as hardwired as our bone structure.
For Pagans, late autumn into winter is the time of the underworld and connecting to our ancestors is easier as a result. Our ancestors feel closer during a season when the natural world seems to fall into a deathlike state. We can see echoes of seasonal ancestral connection in fairly recent history – the celebration of Christmas included the telling of ghost stories during the Victorian era.
To explore winter ancestral connection, there are a few different ideas you could try. One is to think back to stories about your family or early memories and try learning or revisiting a craft that you associate with your family line.If you don’t know what your ancestors might have been skilled at making, you can expand your focus to crafts or activities your culture of origin is known for. For example, as a descendant of Irish immigrants, a craft I could try is woodworking or spinning wool into yarn. Consider learning or revisiting a craft in the evenings after the sun goes down. If there’s a handcraft you’ve always wanted to try, this is a good season to experiment.
Another way to connect to our ancestors is to learn. Online services that help people build family trees and find information about their ancestors frequently run deep discounts during the holiday season. Spending the darker evenings building a family tree and learning some of the story that contributes to who you are could be a beautiful approach to winter this year: a way to weave the thread of human connection during the season of darkness.
In contrast to embracing and leaning into darkness, some Pagans anchor their winter spirituality to the sun instead. This can be especially useful for people who wrestle with seasonal affective disorder and simply cannot find it within themselves to think of the dark season as blessed or sweet. One approach that can be helpful is a designated space for connecting with the sun. It’s generally a windowsill or doorway that receives a lot of sunlight during winter days. This space is then decorated with items in bright, sunny colors and objects that have solar imagery on them. People who engage in this style of practice make a point to sit or stand at their sun spot and consciously open to the sun, being mindfully present for the experience of feeling bathed in sunlight. Sometimes jewelry or stones in sunny colors are placed in the sunlight and then worn or carried to help increase the feeling of solar connection.
Another approach to sun connection is to include solar imagery throughout the home and office during the winter months. In my own home, I shifted my entire Yuletide decorating scheme over to sun symbols and gold as part of this practice.
On days when the weather allows for it, those with more solar anchors to the season spend time outside walking or sitting in the sunlight. By focusing on the brightness and warmth when it’s present, we can carry the echo and influence of sunlight despite longer nights. By surrounding ourselves with cheerful colors and solar imagery, we are reminded that the light and warmth will return.
I’ll give you one more suggestion from my personal practice when it comes to managing seasonal malaise. For me, being around green and growing plants is incredibly helpful, so over the course of winter I make a point of visiting botanical gardens that include large greenhouses or conservatories. Brookside Gardens, the United States Botanic Garden, Rawlings Conservatory, and the rain forest section of the National Aquarium are all wonderful places to visit in our region. When I am there, I make a point of sitting and breathing in the wonderful scent of growing plants and immersing myself in the vision of sunlight on green leaves.
I’m a big believer in the idea of “ten percent better.” For most of us, a ten percent improvement in how we experience our lives is enough to make a really large difference. It takes the edges off, creating more ease in those spaces. In my own life, I’ve observed people as they adopt Pagan winter perspectives and practices and experience an improvement in how they weather the season. We may not be able to stop the seasonal til-a-whirl around the winter holidays, or change the fact that contemporary life requires us to continue working as though it’s the middle of June, but we can create some space. We can choose to embrace the blessed darkness. We can choose to connect to the lives of those who have gone before us. We can choose to anchor ourselves more firmly to the cycle of nature and human history.
We can choose spirituality for the season of darkness and grow deep roots in the winter soil.
This sermon was offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Hagerstown on Sunday, December 8th, 2024.
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