Last night, my wife and my friend and I (all in each other’s bubbles) got together to celebrate the longest night of the year. We lit candles, put the burning Yule log on the tv, and made what I would call an aromatic potpourri? We made squash and pumpkin ravioli from scratch, got some nice bread to spread our home made compotes and jams, and my personal favourite, garlic confit. My wife even took the time to make home made butter! Granted, we have a kitchen aid, which really does help with the process. We also had some store bought eggnog, because we do t hate ourselves and didn’t want to spend three days prepping every single thing we were going to eat.
My wife also set out her ritual alter in the middle our our micro apartment. She has some really cool things she has picked up over the years. A deer spine from her best friend who works in the remote outdoors, an orb of some solid black rock that absorbs most light that touches it, different coloured beeswax candles to represent different wards and blessings, and many more pieces, as well as a slew of different herbs and aromatics for all the things we would be doing over the night. My friend brought with him his incense, crystals that we wanted to charge with good feelings and strength for the new year.
the night started just as normal, all of us being overjoyed at human contact. Despite being in each other’s bubbles, we try to keep contact to social distancing outside in most cases. Being that we were following our laws and rules, and making a small exception to our own strict policies, we were content to sit around a bit, munch on some solstice snacks, and catch up a little bit, Over a cup or three of eggnog of course. After we had all taken a bit of the spread on our plates, we sat down around my wife’s and friends alter pieces to start our solstice rituals
we started to doing a cleansing ritual that had us light a candle, and recite a small mantra. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something along the lines of “I have gratitude for the light returning to our hemisphere, and I am grateful for the light in my life.” The oldest participant is meant to start the ritual, in this case my friend, and he I turn lit my candle with his, and I repeated the mantra. My wife did the same after I lit her candle, and we all dropped some wax into each of our single bowls, and placed the candles on top to it was fixed to the bottom of the bowl. Next we filled the bowl around the lit candle with some water, and took a turn to speak of a light we were grateful for in our lives. Once this was done, we removed our candles, and doused them in our bowl.
having done this it was now time to use this water to wash and cleanse our hands. He headed over to the sink and took turns pouring each other’s bowls over our hands and cleaning our hands. Maybe it was the cool water, maybe it was my mind wanting to believe. But that rinse did leave me feeling oddly calm and a sense of a deeper clean in my hands.
next we made our own personal sigils. This one is a little harder to explain exactly what to do, but I’ll try my best. We each took a paper and a pen, and wrote a phrase that we wanted to embody the new year coming up. Mine personally was “you have all the answers you need”. We then took a minute to go through our phrase and remove any vowels, and repeating letters, until we had what ever was left. Now my wife has her own book that she has created over the years from her learnings and practices, so I can’t tell you exactly the next steps . But when we had our last letters, they corresponded with numbers 1-9. Now each number (1-9) would be drawn out in a clock face pattern, but in an order that doesn’t make immediate sense. Almost like a dart board: you are sure there is a logic to where the points are placed in the board, it’s just not immoderately apparent.
anyway, once we had our corresponding numbers, we would then essentially play an intuitive game of “connect the dots” with our numbers . The lines didn’t have to be straight, they could squiggle, what ever felt right to you. This, once we had each finished, was our personal, and could act as a reminder that of our phrase we wanted to carry to the new year. We were fortunate and had some temporary tattoo pens, so we all got to draw our sigils on our skin as a grounding tool while we were being so open and intimate about what had been going on in the last year for each of us individually. It felt incredibly powerful, as a person who does not consider themselves a creative, so have made my own sigil, and now to see it on my skin. My words, my work, my skin, my goals. If I could be as accurate as possible for a feeling so foreign to me: it felt like it belonged. Like this was the right thing for me. After all, I had just spent the last 45 minutes meditating on myself and the things that have been hard and what I want to change, and now I have that on my skin as a daily reminder of my motivation!
lastly, we burned our pieces of paper, as well as some bay leads to release our phrases to the world, and took the ashes of the sigil papers and bay leafs, and threw them into the wind. I can’t say that that held as much meaning to me, but it did feel like a nice closure to the night. I had no idea what I was actually going to be doing that night, if I’m being honest. But it was a night spent with good friends, and filled with love and acceptance of each other.
