December 21, 2025 Sunday. Winter Solstice. First Day of Winter. The Beginning of the Returning of the Light

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Naturalist's Guide: The Winter Solstice begins on Sunday, December 21, 2025, at 10:03 AM EST—marking the first official day of Winter. During this time, the North Pole is tilted the farthest from the Sun. Sunday will be the shortest day and longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

Midwives of the Soul 

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The winter solstice time is no longer celebrated as it once was, with the understanding that this is a period of descent and rest, of going within our homes, within ourselves and taking in all that we have been through, all that has passed in this full year which is coming to a close... like nature and the animal kingdom around us, this time of hibernation is so necessary for our tired limbs, our burdened minds.

Our modern culture teaches avoidance at a max at this time; alcohol, lights, shopping, overworking, overspending, comfort food and consumerism.

And yet the natural tug to go inwards as nearly all creatures are doing is strong and the weather so bitter that people are left feeling that winter is hard, because for those of us without burning fires and big festive families, it can be lonely and isolating.

Whereas in actual fact winter is kind, she points us in her quiet soft way towards our inner self, towards this annual time of peace and reflection, embracing the darkness and forgiving, accepting and loving, embracing goodbye to the past year.

"Winter takes away the distractions, the buzz, and presents us with the perfect time to rest and withdraw into a womb like love, bringing fire & light to our hearth".

.. and then, just around the corner the new year will begin again, and like a seed planted deep in the earth, we will all rise with renewed energy once again to dance in the sunlight.

Life is a gift a Happy winter to you all...

~ Bridget Anna McNeil

Brigit Anna McNeill

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Dark Of Winter  · Nox Arcana ·

Winter Solstice

This is the longest night of the year, the great turning when the sun pauses at the edge of return and the earth leans fully into darkness.

Here, stories thicken. The ground holds its breath and listens. Frost sketches its temporary prayers along the edges of leaves and windows, and the stars feel nearer, as though they have leaned closer just to hear us breathe.

This winter night is not the absence of life but its inward gathering. Sap is held deep in root and heartwood, the sweetness of the year kept safe against the cold. Seeds lie in the dark, dense with memory and potential, carrying whole landscapes within them. Beneath the soil, unseen lives continue their quiet tending, keeping the future warm in the deepest dark.

So too in us. Our bodies remember this season, even when our minds forget. In the long night, blood and bone draw inward, breath thickens, marrow listens, and something in us trusts that not all growth needs light to begin.

The sun will turn because it always has. The light will return slowly, faithfully, by small degrees that ask for patience rather than force.

May this solstice meet you gently, reminding you that even in the deepest dark, the earth continues its quiet work.

The future is already breathing.

————-

WORDS Brigit Anna McNeill

ART Tijana Lukovic

Friday, December 19, 2025

Rivers in the Ocean

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Night Blessing

May the winter moon pour silver over your path, softening the edges of worry.

May the trees wrapped in snow remind you of resilience and grace.

May the cold air outside make the warmth inside more precious.

May you rise tomorrow with light woven into your heart.

Rivers in the Ocean

December 16, 2025 Tuesday

(I lost the page I borrowed this from.  Credit goes to whomever originally wrote this.)

"December asks us to remember what our culture forgets.
That darkness is not a failure of light.
That slowing is not a deviation from the path,
but part of the path itself.

We live in a world that praises the bright, the busy, the blossoming, the forever-spring of productivity and performance.
But the living world whispers something older.
Winter is the season that teaches the roots how to deepen.
The season that gathers the stories we were too hurried to hear.
The season that turns fallen leaves into nourishment and creates the rich, dark soil that makes all future blooming possible.

Nothing in nature rushes through this threshold.
The trees soften into stillness.
The fox moves with deliberate economy.
The seeds rest, carrying whole futures inside their quiet bodies.
Even the light withdraws in gentle increments,
as if showing us how to tend ourselves with patience.

December is not a void but a womb.
A place of brewing, composting, gestating.
A time when the unseen work is the most powerful of all, the kind that reshapes us from the inside out.

As we enter the deep of winter, may we remember that darkness has its own kind of beauty, its own kind of truth.
And that every bright, blooming April
is rooted in a December that dared to rest."
———-
• ART- All pictures by @tijanadraws 

December 12, 2025

 "Long ago, in shamanic cultures, we knew how to communicate with the Life of the Earth: with the spirits of the plants, the water, the mountains, the animals, and with the Life of the Cosmos — the sun, the moon and the stars in the night sky. We also knew how to communicate with the ancestors and their wisdom. Today, we have lost those skills and are increasingly losing the skill of communicating with each other, listening to each other, respecting each other.

All this has come about because, over centuries and millennia, the visible, material world has become separated from the invisible one. We have lost the thread of Ariadne that once connected us to our cosmic Source. Belief, directed by powerful priesthoods, became a substitute for direct shamanic experience of the Source. We have lost touch with our soul — even the awareness that we have a soul. Cut off from soul, our mind has become impoverished, rigid, dogmatic, and inflated. In compensation for the loss of relationship with soul, it has become driven by the need for ever more power and control, which is why we find ourselves in the extraordinary situation we are in today when millions are suffering the effects of wars and from physical and mental illness, and we are threatened with becoming inducted into a technology that could replace our species with a transhumanist one created by AI, which could bring our species to an end. We need urgently to find our way back the way we have come, towards nature and the ground of our own nature."

-Anne Baring, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

December 8, 2025 Monday

December 3, 2025

What a beautiful full Cold Moon

My Frankie kitty has been diagnosed with diabetes.  He is only 4 and I am completely overwhelmed.  Shots twice a day.  His sugar was super high.  

December 1, 2025

To usher in the season,

you need no other reason

In the morn, before you speak another word,

say rabbit, rabbit, rabbit,

to ensure a month of luck, and a super cool Yule!