Winter Solstice

When I first began to practice Wicca, I was only nineteen. Yule, the winter solistice, didn't mean that much to me. It was the Pagan Christmas. The imagery of the mother Goddess was beautiful but not really poignant. I never really thought much about Yule. What it meant, symoblized.

This Yule has come at a time when I'm feeling very insecure, very conflicted about many things. And while it would be easy to assioate this darkness with Yule darkness, I've rethought the idea of darkness. This time of year Neopagans imagine the God as the Sun King, dying as a sacrfice. But there is also the image that the Goddess is stirring with life. She is the force that brings the Sun King back to life, that brings the sun back to the earth. She is pregnant with life.

As the darkness presses in so early, instead of being trapped, I imagined myself as a seed. A seed tucked deep down in the earth. The darkness that wraps around me is not suffocating night but rather the earth. It is the earth filled with nutrients and power. All those feelings I have had for the last few months...these longings for something that I did not understand...these feelings make sense in this imagery.

What I want to germinate during this time....a love for my body. A love that I did know in Paganism and that I want back again. During this long darkness, I want to grow a new love for this body. I am tired to trying to escape it, change it, deny it. It's my body. It's who I am. I want to embrace that whoness. I am now a mother, and this body is a mother's body. It is the body that gave shelter to three seeds. I realized that much of my problem is that I am trying to see the body of the woman I was before kids. Instead of relishign in the body of a mother, I was ashamed. That seems poor payment for a body that carried and delivered three children.