Winter Solstice

dating back to the beginning. I'm feeling a little thrilled to be talking about it today because I'm not only in the midst as we all are, of a seasonal solstice, but also I think we're in a cultural solstice right now, where we don't really know what's going to happen, in this same way that the ancients huddled around Stonehenge didn't really quite know whether or not the sun would begin

to move again. I'm Caroline McVicker Edwards, and we're going to get to talk about a book that I wrote about twenty years ago called The Return of the Light, Twelve Tales from around the World for the Winter Solstice. Carolyn is also a lifelong educator. I imagine that you have spent a lot of time talking to children. That's true.

If you were having a discussion, maybe doing some explanation to a child about the sun and the changing of seasons and that drama, how might that conversation go mm hmm. So every year there's a time. It's summertime, when school is out, when the days are really long, Right, you're playing out in the street till nine clock, and you don't have to come in because it's getting dark, and it's not cold. In fact, it's hot and the sun is there all day long for you to swim and play.

And depending on where you are, it might be really hot and you might have to come in and get in the shade, but the sun is out. And then comes Halloween, and Halloween you can tell that by the time you go trick or treating, it's dark much earlier than it was in the summer. Halloween is a time when we think about the dark, we think about the beginning of the dark. Like we plant a seed inside of the dirt, and the seed is, of course, the sun. It's kind of like a Halloween. We're plucking the seed

of the sun out of the sky. It's not there for us anywhere. We're putting it in the ground. And it's going to grow again. It we have to plant it and be in the dark, be with the idea that death comes and the leaves fall, and all the fruits that we're on our fruit trees we've now gathered in and we're eating. And especially if we celebrate the Day of the Dead, we think about all the people who came before us that handed down our stories and

our ways of connecting to each other. And then after Halloween it gets even darker and darker, and people start putting up lights. And then somewhere after whatever holiday you celebrate, it might be Christmas, it might be Quands, that might be Honukkah, then you start noticing, oh, it's getting a little bit lighter and a little tiny bit lighter every day, until it's almost like the light has been born, like it's a little baby. And by February it's kind of

like a teenager. The days are much longer than they were in December, and then they get longer and longer and longer, until finally in June the days are as long as they're going to be all year. If you live way up high towards the North Pole, the sun doesn't set at all. It doesn't appear to set. It's just light all around the clock, and then it gets darker and darker and darker. The light gets smaller and smaller, and the dark gets bigger and bigger, and then it

happens all over again the next year. What do we mean by the word solstice, So it literally means sun soul stice stands still around what we call the winter solstice, which is the twenty two December in the northern hemisphere on the horizon. The sun appears to just sort of hang there that period of time. Those six days where the sun does not appear to be moving were terrifying. If it did not appear to begin to move again, the light would not lengthen and there would not be

light for crops to grow. So there was all kinds of rituals that developed, both celebratory but also to teach the sun to return, and it became a focus of communal life to encourage the sun and encourage each other. And we still certainly have remnants of that in all the Christmas lights, the Hanukah lights, the Quansa lights, and we speak in the way that people have for a long time about gathering together and putting away enmity and

taking care of each other and feeding the hungry. We get really collectively tightened up at this time of year because it's a scary time of year. For millennia, the solstice has been formally recognized by cultures across the world, from the Roman festivals of Brumalia, Saturnalia, and Opalia, the Chinese dong Gi Yalda, the Persian celebration recognizing the birth of Mithra, the sun god, and countless others. It seems

that commemorating the beginning of winter is an almost universal tradition. Well, you know, near the equator, there isn't this big drama that we experience in both the southern and northern hemispheres as they move farther towards the poles. But there's always an experience for human beings of in some way, both in our personal lives and in our cultural lives, of not no wing what's coming next, and feeling afraid, and then this coalescing of community around that. Because we're mammals, right,

we share a kind of a collective nervous system. We share our anxiety, and we share our calm and doing things together like singing and dancing and ritual, just being together, touching shoulders on the couch, putting our arms around our kids, cooking and eating together. These things are nervous system commerce. Yes, it is often focused on the sun, but there are other ways that we metaphorically experience a standing still in

the sense that we don't know what's coming. And I think that you will find across the world, across cultures, ways that people come together around asking for help from the gods, from the power, ways that they come together around making decisions that are big decisions that affect the group. And you will find connected with those a sense of humility and surrender to powers that are greater than the group,

and yet that can be contacted by the group. Caroline's Winter Solstice collection, The Return of the Light retaels folk tales and myths that have passed down from cultures around the world, some of which date back to antiquity. For the Retellings, it's a process of finding myself in the story in some way, finding the place where I resonate psychologically, and then to collect them. It was important for me in general, is to have some sort of organizing principle.

In this case with this book, it was chaos theory, which basically says that at the edges of things, it's chaotic, but it's paradox because if you look at mandel Brock's designs at the microscopic level, they're these fantastically beautiful patterns. So it's completely chaotic and there's a pattern. It is my own overlay, because of course, the ancients did not talk explicitly about this kind of anxiety. They told stories,

and the stories were not invented by one person. It's a kind of a mystery how stories rise up and get told in our past on. But my hypothesis is these stories are the ancients way of talking about the chaos at the edge where you don't know what's going on, and the folk tales address that by using the themes of theft, surrender, and race. The first selection of four stories are unified by their theme of theft, the stealing

of the light. It's it's so interesting. I mean, so many of these stories begin with like in the time where the world was just dark and like that was just not working for people. There was somebody that got fed up and or you know, felt ostracized, it felt one off, and it was like, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna take a leap of faith. I'm gonna do something courageous, and I'm gonna hatch a crazy scheme and go up here and steal all of it are a little bit,

or get what I can of this light. Yes, so it's kind of a celebration of a certain kind of initiative from the lament Coo Mewalk tribe people indigenous to the north coast of California round Bodega Bay. Our first

story is why Hummingbird has a red throat. Really, Hummingbird ends up being the thief, but the story actually begins with marsh wren Chaka, who is left out of the group and feels a shame and hunkered down rage that he's left out, and so he uses his sharp little beak to punch out the sun, almost as if it were a bladder. So he pops it like a balloon. And then coyote gets involved, and the trickster coyote enless

Hummingbird to go and steal some of the light. Hummingbird is the only one that can get through the tiny crack in the sky. Swooping in, he steals some of the sun and as he clutches it against his throat, he gets that red marking that he doesn't have for the story birds. The next story is from the Thoria Risa, a group of tribal people's in India, and it's the story of a young girl with a set of beautiful ear rings. Bearings are classic backed injuries you know who.

Bearings have always been in style, so it's something you can't go wrong with. A kite, which is like a kestrel or a hawk rips one of the ear rings from her ear steals her earring and carries it up to the otherwise all dark sky and hangs it there

where it becomes the sun gold bearing castabout. In the next story from the Inuit people of North America, tuopy Lock, who is sort of a magician, ends up taking the sun for himself, and then Raven, of course, a very famous trickster, figures out a way to turn himself into a feather and to float on the water which is quoughed down by this beautiful daughter of tuopy Lock, and she then gives birth to a little baby, who is of course Raven in disguise, who ends up wailing for

the big bags in which the magician has hung up the sun and the moon. They give in to him and Raven takes the light back to his people. So again it's a trickster kind of energy required to work here at the Edges. And then finally again from the Arisa, the sun Cow and the Thief. As a special treat, we'll have Caroline read the sun Cow in the Thief

later in the episode. After Theft, come Surrender. In my own process, it feels like I have to sit with the senses that I have around feeling mugged or that kind of shocked grief or that kind of perception of loss, and have to move away from my denial and into that feeling, and then the next step is to surrender to it, to just let go without knowing what the

outcome can be. So in the theft stories there's sort of a resistance to the status quo, and in the surrender stories there's more of an allowing change to happen, of saying yes, I need to change, we need to change, this needs to change, this needs to move, and something might even have to be broken. The first story in that section about Maui, who is also like Raven, a super famous trickster, a Polynesian trickster. This time the surrender is actually from the sun itself. His legs are broken.

He's like, okay, okay, okay, I give in, and the broken legs allow half of the year the sun to walk slowly across the sky. That next story, which I'm telling not from the emperor's point of view but from a tribal point of view, is from the Meut Sioux people's, who are indigenous peoples of China. It posits that there are six sons which are burning the earth up. This very thoughtful warrior realizes that the suns cannot be shot out of the sky, as the other warriors are trying

to do. But there's this as a of so below moment. Instead of shooting the sun's out of the sky, he finds their reflection in water and shoots them out of the water. And then only one son is left, but grieving his brother's hides in a cave, and of course we have the sun again refusing to come out or being resistant. But then the crowing of the rooster outside the caves door enchants the sun into coming out. So the sun surrenders in a sweet way. In that story,

instead of like okay, okay, I give in. It's like, whoa, what is this beautiful music outside? What is this crowing? And then the sun comes all the way out and lights things up again. It seems to me that there's people, maybe myself being one, that would take issue at the sun on that point. It's like, should you have maybe like listen to a little bit more rooster crowing before you went with that is your wake up song that's been driving peoples for ages. But along with these eleven

folk tns, Caroline decided to include one myth. The North Smith poses Light as a beautiful young man and his brother, who is Darkness, is blind Balder, the god of Light, has a dream that he will die, and so the whole story revolves around the frantic work of the gods and goddesses to keep this beautiful young man alive. And Loki, of course, is the trickster, and he's jealous of all the attention the god of Light is getting, and so he arranges to trick blind Hode, the twin of Light

the Dark, into accidentally killing his brother. Loki finds out that Mistletoe is the one being on earth not already exhorted not to hurt poor Balder, the god of Light, because everybody thinks that mistletoe is too weak to do any harm anyway. But in Loki's hand, and he puts it into the god of Darkness's hand, it does harm Balder, and Balder dies, his wife dies of grief. And this is the epic level. The whole world collapses because there

is no light. You find terrible destruction in North Smith's and it was a very harsh place on the planet to live. Loki is punished, and then finally, out of the ashes comes Balder again, light free from the underworld, and I love this part. The only two humans left in the Middle world, between the Upper world and the lower world, the two who had hidden themselves away, came out into this new light. Their names were Life and

the Stubborn Will to Live. The gods and goddesses. Then the ones who were left gathered together on the sunlit plane of the Upper World, home of the Wind, shyly, joyfully. They clung to the returning couple, even as Life and Stubborn Will to Live had clung to each other in the Middle World. The gods and goddesses sifted through the wreckage of their great Hall in the ruins, they found the golden chess pieces with which they had once amused themselves. Slowly, slowly,

they began to play again. So there's the two characters of life and the stubborn will to live? What do those mean? Do you? How do you separate those two things? Oh? Well, I guess one feels like, you know, you picture the grass coming up through the cement sidewalk crack, you know that life will out. There's that amazing book about the abandoned land at Chernobyl, which had that terrible nuclear accident

thirty years ago. Now no humans live there, but it's just a vibrating with life because humans have kept their hands off at all this time. And then the stubborn will to live feels like it's a very human thing, or maybe it's just a sentient being thing that there is inside of animals and people and maybe the planet itself. There is this will towards life. So the one seems like a force that is completely mysterious, and the other seems like more of an emotional response to that force.

The last story in the surrender section is this really sweet story from the Sukumba people of Tanzania about these three little, tiny animals. Once again, you this theme of you need to be small to get through the crack, to get to the other side where their son is. In this case, it's not a theft. It's the three little animals working together in order to outwit the sky

people who are refusing to give away their light. In particular, Fly very reluctantly agrees to work with Spider, at first saying like, no, I'm not working with Spider polic you know, Spider will eat me, and then being reminded like, you know, the overarching theme here is we have to work together, and so Fly surrenders to that bigger call, the Harambi call of we have to work together, we have to pull together here, and thus manages to work with his

enemy to get light, and after surrender comes grace. We all know that sometimes something just comes to us that has nothing to do with our will. We may have asked for help. That's part of the surrender of like okay, I need help, but we get more than we asked for. We get held in a way that we couldn't have imagined. I mean, in the smallest ways. There's this sense that there is a way that we're taken care of that

is bigger than anything that we can plan. That first one is from the Kung Sun people in the Kalahari Desert. The Kung Sun call everybody like dog people and people be people mongoose people, because they recognize the relational nous of all of us to each other. In this one, Grandfather Mantus starts off trying to solve the cold and dark problem. It's Grandfather Manis who tells them to go to sun Man, who's fallen asleep. He's heaved into the

air and hot, beautiful light cores from his armpits. Any person keep me trying, No, sir, you don't do what I do. One stay dry. Sun Man, mon Goose shouted, you must go up high in the sky. You must make heat and life for us, so we will no longer be cold, and so the whole earth will have day. Sun Man heard, He let himself, so there's that grace moment for all of us. He let himself grow hottest fire and let his tumbling turn him round as a ball. That day, sun Man became a bright circle of heat

up high in the sky. Grandfather Mantis was proud. He tapped his old brown tooth. Look man is equal to me, who but I have them magic thin legs, shuffling in the dust and head nodding. He began a gay and boastful dance. And then you have the girl who married the son from the Luya people of Kenya and Uganda. The Sun lives on the other side of the sky and gets very interested in this beautiful young woman who

is lost in the woods. She's runaway, she doesn't want to marry, and this rope descends from heaven and she doesn't even notice it at first, but it's just dangling there, and she grasps it. She's lifted up into the land of the Sun. He, in order to woo her, gives her his rays shut up in a vessel, and she ends up taking the lid off that vessel so that it pours down to her people below. Sometimes the most gracious gift of all is an empty box. Let us

borrow empty vessels, said Master chart century German mystic. And the et reat box, which in the next story is called the light Keeper's box, could be such a vessel, pouring out the spaciousness into which the new can flow. So there's that grace again of being willing to give away without any promise of return, and there is no promise. Really, you might give away and not get grace. But there's

something in the giving away that moistens I love. That line moistens the spirits of all beings with generosity and cooperation. The Lightkeeper's Box, which is from the Wadau people in Venezuela, that's a wonderful story about gift culture, giving things away rather than selling things, what anthropologist called commodity culture. That basically is a story about this chief sending each of

his daughter's out to find the light keeper. The first one stays with deer, and the second one finds the light keeper, but there's arrows in both of them, which is again grace. Take the romance part out of it. It's about love and connection. Finally, the et red box and it's light get hurled into the sky, but it's moving too fast, and so the chief sends turtle up to befriend the light and because turtle moves slowly, Sun

has to slow down and wait for turtle. This is of course from an equatorial region that moves at turtles pace, as the end of the story says, so that the day lasts just long enough until the night comes to the world by the Orinoco River on this war empty dream. And then Labe Fauna and the Royal Child of Light. So Italy has the counterpart to Santa Claus, an old witchy woman who rides a broom called labe Fauna, and she rides around each year looking for the child of Light.

And she leaves sweeps at every house in case the child inside is the child who will light up the world. That's again that kind of grace, like it isn't just one child stick around after the break to hear Caroline read a couple of selections from her book. Can I read you a paragraph? You can read me anything, alright, you can read me the whole book. Collected here, one for each of the twelve days that, for so long

bridged one light cycle with another. Are my retellings of twelve traditional stories about light from all over the world. Not all these tales are literally about the winter solstice, though some are, but each illuminates our fundamental connection to light and its cycles of birth, death, and regeneration. Each crystallizes the significance of light's return each year. Like vessels, the stories carry us across the stormy, flotsamy slippery edge

of night. We cross over in three different ways, by theft, by surrender, through grace. There are four stories for each kind of crossing. When our personalities clutch their old habits, the thief may have to grab what we otherwise won't let go. When are so functional egos find their orders scuttled some other deeper self finally surrenders to the new. And then there are those miraculous gifts, those blessings that

shower down upon us. Read the stories aloud in company by candlelight, play the games, make the rights sing, the songs, revel together with the animals and the villagers snuggle in the egg of the dark. You published and never wanted you to do an audiobook of this book on tape. It would be fun, wouldn't it. I was looking for when I came across your book, I was like, this

gotta it's gotta be. But that's a great idea. If you were going to read a story, I have to that that I would that I would ask you to just choose which one you'd like to do. I don't know, if I don't know, if there's all be surprises to you or not. But the two that that I would be happy with with either one of are The Sun Coow and the Thief or the Pull Together Morning. Well, you know, I would love to read The Sun Cow and the Thief because it's sort of told in almost

like an intantery way, like almost like a chant. Is there anything context wise about that story that we need to set up, like any terms or anything. Obviously, the Cow has a particular significance in India. It is even though it is a tribal story and so thus it's not part of Hinduism, it does borrow from the Hindu neighbors in that the Hindu tell the story of Surya, the on god born from the heavenly cow a d t. And so there is this cultural overlap and borrowing they're

implied in the story. The Orisa have the largest variety of tribal communities on the ethnographic map of India. The Kutia cond arc farmers who specialize in the soulful craft of wood carving. Like other Oresa. They have at the core of their communal strength the village council and the dormitory. The dormitory is the largest hut three sided, open in front, hung with musical instruments and decorated with symbols of the

animal spirits. When the workday is done, it is the site for the gathering of everyone in the village for the dance. It functions as a kind of school of dance for youngsters growing into tribal traditions, and it is the meeting place where the elders of the village council, who make decisions affecting every social, economic, and religious part of life. The Arisa borrow from their Hindu neighbors, and

their neighbors borrow from them. The Hindu tell the story of Surya, the sun god, born from the heavenly cow Aditi. The Hindi word for cow go also means ray of dawn or ray of spiritual illumination. The sun cow and the thief. Back at the beginning, the village was like a hinged box with many sides. A lonely man stood on the outside. Looking in through the cracks. He could

see rightly colored crisscross lines everywhere. People walked to and fro along the lines, carving shapes and painting shimmering colors as they went. The man saw an order so neat and easy. It seemed he should have been able to slide right in, the very blood in his body, singing. But something was wrong with him, with the way things were, he could not get in. It was as if the village had no doors, only cracks. He could only look, never touch. He would always be on the outside, looking in.

Round the edges of the box, the sun cow walked round and round its perfect side. She walked, milking out her light in the day, filling the village box with color and warmth. At she chewed her cut her black sides, giving quiet warmth but no light. The man stood between sun cow in the village. The only warmth that the man could touch was sun cow herself. Whenever those inside the village looked out, they saw only their son cow, that lovely black heat that night tour, that daymaker. They

smacked their lips with the cream of it. They did not say, look at that nice man standing outside looking in. How silly that he stands alone at the edge, when we could simply make a place for him in our village of carvings, of shapes and colors. Come, sir, you are welcome. They didn't say that. They didn't even see him, And so The man waited for the sun cow every day, waited for her her to pass him by. He smelled her musky flanks, saw her soft eyes, and touched her

velvet hot muzzle. By some mysterious pressure, her light honey milk poured out from her utter. The man could feel the pressure of his own sadness inside him all at once. One day, the man decided to take the sun cow for himself. When all the pretty village people could not have her anymore, then finally everything might be fair. So he waited for her, not even bothering to hide. The village people could not see him after all, and she had walked sweetly near him, nonchalant, every day of his life.

The day he stole sun Cow, he simply tossed a noose over her head and pulled her away away over the edge of the world, away from the box, away from all the can't get in. Away alone to the edge, the lights and colors in the village plunged into darkness. Without sun Cow's milk, there was only night. The people could not see. Babies cried, unfound and unfed by their mothers. No one knew when to wake up, when to work. All the order lay like unswept wood scraps in a

dark room. The tidy lines were lumped and smudged, The colors disappeared. Where had their sun Cow gone? What had become of her? They waited in sorrow and fear. The thief was having his own problems. At the beginning, he luxuriated in the warmth of sun Cow's solidity, in her rhythmical, grassy breath. But away from her circling walk around the little box world, away from her habits, no light came from her utter, And because she would not let him

milk her, it was night for him too. No one else had her, But now he didn't have her either. When the thief, in desperation, tried to set beneath her a pail and squeeze her teeths, she kicked the pail away with such certain force that he feared that she would kick him too, should he persist. She was only trying to save his life, of course, for just think what would happen to a single person who tried to

milk the sun. The thief held his head in his hands for ever so long he sat, hoping for her light again, longing for a sign that he might milk her. Finally he knew he could not keep her anymore. He leaned against her for goodbye, for a final giving in to going back to the endless looking in and never having. Then he slipped the noose from its steak and from over her head, and set the sun cow free. But

she did not return to her circling walk around the village. Instead, she leapt up high, joyously high up over the moon. Now she walks not just around one village, but in a vast sky circle, around all the villages, around the circle of the whole world, so that no one now needs simply look in without being part, without being seen. Everywhere there are doors, carved intersections, lines criss crossing that can be walked in and about, shivering and shining with color.

Everywhere there is light. You know, it's so interesting. There's a theft, obviously, the theft of the cow, and then the thief surrenders the cow. Eventually he realizes that it's fruitless. And then there's a grace of the cow not going back into the pen, but going into the sky and giving that sort of profound gift, like something that you couldn't have even known to ask for. Yes, you picked exactly the story that has all three in it, didn't you. I just got lucky. I think we'll call that another

little bit of gracer serendipity. Yeah. This episode of Ephemeral was written and assembled by Alex Williams, with producers Max Williams and Trevor Young. The book we discussed today is The Return of the Light, twelve tales from around the world for the winter Solstice. Caroline has also authored the collections Sun Story In the Light of the Moon and The Storyteller's Goddess. Find them wherever books are sold and learn more at Caroline mc vickar edwards dot com. Links

and more at our website Ephemeral dot Show. And however you celebrate, I hope your Solstice is full of warmth, light and grace