Winter Solstice 2008

This is a wonderful post by one of my favorite astrologers, Caroline Casey. The Winter Solstice is such a magical time of year; an excellent time to set some goals for our lives.

Check out Caroline's many excellent offerings at:

http://tinyurl.com/8szhyo and

http://www.coyotenetworknews.com/

SOLSTICE INVOCATION FOR TRICKSTER ALLIES
by Caroline Casey

This is the midnight hour of the year, and of 8,000 years of Empire in which humans ceded authority (Saturn) to socio-pathic dingbats. Until now!

This Solstice poses the question: "What must we die to, within and without, lest we die from."

The I Ching chimes in: 24. The Turning Point -- Winter Solstice

"After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement but it is not brought about by force. Societies of people with a unifying vision are formed. But since these groups come together in full public knowledge and are in harmony with the time, all selfish tendencies are excluded, and no mistake is made. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time."

"From deep stillness comes replenishment and the gathering of strategy and wits. Not striving, but calm and merriment.

"The Winter Solstice has always been celebrated as the resting time of the year. In winter the life energy is still underground. Movement is just at its beginning; therefore it must be strengthened by rest, so that it will not be dissipated by being used prematurely.

"The return of health after illness, the return of understanding after an estrangement; everything must be treated tenderly and with care at the beginning, so that the return may lead to flowering."

Now more than ever.

All of Creation is holding its breath at this deep time, anticipating the birth, within each human heart, of wonder and a willingness to cooperate with everything. May we kindle the warm glow of Trickster kindness, within us all, transform our emotional default setting to one of "Woof
Woof, wanna play!?!" Each moment awaits our imaginative dedication.

So let's toss all that is neither beautiful nor useful into the roiling cauldron of re-birth, that Time is so kindly providing us. Let's compost all past- patterns of self-sabotage, personal and collective, for starters.

And let's bow at the threshold of this New Year, to release and redeem all that we do not wish to take with us through the door. Remorse is said to be the highest of the negative states, the closest to clarity --because we see and feel all those times when we didn't respond to life's "woof woof wanna play?!" When we fell for the compelling illusion of separateness, and forgot that we are all in one large, pulsing, shape-shifting-according-to-collaborative-intent dream.

The Sufi, and we with her, gently pats her heart and whispers "estafirahlah" "forgiveness of self and others." And may "forgive" mean "to give energy for change."

The protoplasm of reality is particularly susceptible to imprint now, by the power of word, language, story and metaphor. Allowing ourselves one true hyperbole: Never before has the power of human story-telling been so essential in determining what dies and what lives.

Let us dedicate ourselves to animating the desirable story. (To do otherwise would be complicitous with the evolutionary dead-end of empire.) We suck the chi of our complicity from that which is dying, and exhale into the blooming of dynamic collaborative kinship. We are here to re-dedicate ourselves to the responsibility of dreaming the desirable world into being.

Saturnalia: Deeper Dedication is the anti-dote to fear, as feeling useful is the anti-dote to depression. There -- that's handled.

So, let's visualize and dedicate, wherever we are around the Solstice time, and journeying on into this powerful Winter, that we are offering our unique and necessary Medicine, into the collective cauldron brew, and ladling ourselves a cup of All-Heal.

Trickster Medicine is really the sine qua non that brings all the other medicines into bubbling accord to produce the elixir of Dynamic Reverent Ingenuity.


- CAROLINE CASEY