The Longest Night

Winter – Week 50 – On Hearth and Hope

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures – and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

Today the earth holds its breath. The winter solstice arrived at precisely 4:21 this morning, the moment when our hemisphere tilts furthest from the sun, when darkness claims its longest reign. After tonight, light begins its slow return. Not all at once, not with fanfare, but gradually, stubbornly, like a promise kept in increments too small to see but large enough to trust.

This is the deep turning point, the still pivot where the year tips from deepening to awakening. The ancient ones knew this threshold held power. They marked it with fire and feast, with ritual and reverence. They called it Yule.

For twelve days beginning tonight, Yuletide stretches before us. That old Germanic tradition of honoring the sun through its most vulnerable time. Twelve days, because that’s how long it takes for the light’s return to become visible to human eyes, for the sun’s strengthening to move from faith into sight. Twelve nights when the veil between worlds grows thinnest, each requiring its own tending, its own protection, its own keeping of the flame. The Romans celebrated Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. The Slavs lit fires and dressed as spirits to walk between worlds. The Norse burned the great Yule log, not just for warmth but for luck, for protection, for glimpsing the future in dancing flames.

In many European traditions, a log was chosen with ceremony: oak for strength, ash for protection, birch for new beginnings. It was brought to the hearth and anointed like something holy: honey for sweetness, salt for preservation, wine for joy. Then it was set to burn through the night. People watched the sparks rise like prayers. A single flame meant good news coming. Two promised new love. Three foretold a birth in spring. The log was meant to burn all through the dark hours, an unbroken chain of flame carrying warmth, blessing, and hope from one year to the next.

This is what our ancestors understood: that we must actively call the light back. That hope is not passive but participatory. That on the darkest night, we tend the hearth. Both the one in our homes and the one in our hearts.

Yule magic surrounds us still, if we know how to look. The wreaths on doors aren’t mere decoration, they’re circles of eternity, evergreen promises that life persists even when everything appears dead. Holly berries shine impossibly red against gray winter skies, drops of blood-bright defiance. Firs stand green and fragrant, refusing to surrender. These aren’t just nature’s beauty, they’re messages, guardians, and promises from the unseen world.

Yesterday, in the snow showers, the elk returned to the hillside by the barn. Not just a few but a great throng of them, perhaps driven together by the wild storms of recent days, perhaps drawn by something older than weather. Their presence is a blessing, a sacred reminder that we’re not alone in this season of darkness and endurance. They carry the same ancient knowledge our ancestors carried: that survival requires gathering close, requires community, requires trusting the wheel will turn.

Through those same hours, a bald eagle rode the winter thermals, that messenger of vision and courage. My beloved geese called to each other across the frost-white fields. At the front window, I counted maybe thirty birds: juncos and chickadees, finches and blue jays, all kinds coming to the seeds and water I’d set out. We must care for our brothers and sisters. In winter, this tending is how we all survive together.

The old traditions teach us that the solstice is a threshold time, when the veil between worlds grows thin. Animals become messengers. Dreams hold prophecy. The ordinary world cracks open just enough to let the extraordinary slip through. This is why people watched the Yule log’s sparks for omens. This is why we still feel something quicken in us on the longest night. Some knowing deeper than thought, that we’re standing in a doorway between what was and what might yet be.

I will walk Finnbar this cold, frosty solstice morning, our breath clouding white, our footsteps crunching in the stillness. Later I’ll make candied oranges, filling the house with that bright citrus scent like captured sunshine. I’ll prepare food for the days ahead, making ready for the slow unfolding of celebration that is Yuletide. Not one day but twelve, not one meal but many, not one flame but a fire tended through the dark season’s heart.

What a gift to experience this time with presence and gratitude. To feel myself settling into these rhythms, into this land, into traditions both ancient and newly made.

And maybe that settling is recognition, that I’m part of an unbroken chain, just like that Yule log’s flame meant to carry hope from one year to the next. My British ancestors who marked midwinter, the spirits of all the lands that have held me and changed me, the indigenous peoples who knew these Colorado mountains and creeks and plains long before I arrived – they’re all part of this chain. Every human who ever stood on the longest night and chose to light a fire against the dark. We’re all connected in this fundamental act of faith that light returns.

The solstice is an invitation. Not just to survive winter but to meet it fully, to recognize that darkness holds its own gifts. That the longest night is when we most clearly see the stars. That descent and ascent are part of the same sacred motion. That the wheel turns whether we acknowledge it or not. But how much richer it is when we mark the turning with intention, with reverence, with our own small fires lit against the dark.

Tonight the earth reaches its deepest tilt away from the sun. Tomorrow the light begins its slow return. This is the promise that has sustained us through every winter, every dark season, every moment when hope seemed impossible: the light will return.

May your hearth stay warm. May you watch for the signs all around you. May you recognize yourself as part of this ancient, ongoing ceremony of calling light back into the world.

The longest night is here. Light the fires. Tend the flame. The turning has begun.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane