Celebrating the Small Wins
I’m writing this the day after 2023's Winter Solstice. Today is the first day of the solar new year. We’ve had a lot of rain through the night and early morning here in the Mojave high desert and the atmosphere is filled with that indescribable magic of those rare wet, cloud-mist days out here. All the senses are compelled into presence and stillness.
Even the mind’s rushabout chatter and to-do listing fall quiet. Nothing to hurry towards so just be here now, the mind concedes.
If I could bottle this and send it to you as a solstice gift, I would. But as it is, I hope this transmission exhales some of the magic to you.
Even though there was no rain and mist, yesterday was also the same. Solstices are strongly felt here. The skies were readying themselves in quite magnificent ways for overnight storms, and as the sun prepared to stand still before its ascent and rebirth here in the northern hemisphere, the day’s doings were also quite richly infused with that fertile stillness.
While some of yesterday was spent being with the seeds of intentions for the coming year, more of it was spent in celebratory retrospection of all that this year has been.
I remembered back to 2022, and the deep grief a late summer miscarriage, that I was still holding myself through that winter, a year ago now.
Supporting others in tending and transmuting grief, loss and sorrow into glimmering gold is one of my gifts, and I held myself through this slow process with fierce love - with the guidance of beloved teachers, human and more-than-human.
Rushing through the felt-sense experience of grief, of intellectualizing it, of refusing to turn towards it, denies the love that lies beneath it. It denies the art that wants to be born from it.
And so, I let myself be guided by grief - feeling it without getting stuck in it, without becoming enmeshed with it, so it could authentically collaborate with me. It took me to some intense places. And in the early part of 2023, it delivered me back to home to my Self, with more parts of me reclaimed and ready to be woven back into wholeness, which is what this year has been.
Yesterday’s retrospective of 2023 was a celebration of this reweaving, this slow, organic regeneration of my inner soil. As I gave myself the space to pause, acknowledge and reflect on all that has been taking place in my subterranean realms, I saw that the grief had dissolved and evolved into a radical, shameless celebratory love. After 2022, this year's slow rebirthing of Self has required all the ‘work’ to be done in the unseen. And I can feel the effects because of how profoundly more at home I feel in my skin, my body and my life.
And of course, it was on Winter Solstice that this realization fully landed in body-mind-soul.
Yesterday, today, everyday - I celebrate the small and slow things, the seemingly insignificant things that the socialized mind wants to bypass or negate. I celebrate the time and tending to honor and quietly integrate big and small shifts into authentic embodiment, and the capacity this naturally creates to anchor ever-deeper into the wisdom of what feels right to me.
In a world that constantly marches to the beat of the ‘big wins’, it’s a necessary disruption to attune instead to Nature’s rhythm (which is also our rhythm.) By tending our inner soil through the irrational celebration of the small, seemingly insignificant wins, those hidden, inner shifts and evolutions - accessed through the subjective truth of the felt-sense - can become the nutrient-dense earth which nourishes the healthy, non-GMO growth of the ‘big wins.’
It takes all the small, slow, unseen things under the ground that cause a tree to grow and bear fruit, in its own season and rhythm. And that fruit is delicious and nourishing to all who are drawn to taste it.
So as we enter a new solar year, I share this gift from Winter Solstice with you, especially if you’re not celebrating any ‘big wins’, especially if your mind wants to deny the significance of the small, hidden victories:
Celebrate yourself. Celebrate how far you’ve come this year (because you have, and if you allow yourself to appreciate that, you'll feel it and know it.)
Celebrate your own rhythms and cycles (which are also Nature’s.)
We belong to earth + sky: when we sing songs of love and celebration to the land, to fallen leaves decomposing into the soil, to tiny seeds still under the ground with their unseen roots quietly growing down into the depths, to the unhurried cycles of sun and moon, we’re all nourished by the growth that emerges.