Solstice

Last year, on a whim, I decided to watch the winter solstice happen on a passage tomb livestream. From my sofa in Glasgow, I did not envy the big crowd of people standing in the cold, dim Boyne Valley outside the white-faced mound of Newgrange. Only a precious handful of them had won the lottery to be in the Neolithic tomb when the light would creep through the ancient window. The rest would wait, forced to merely imagine the event that’s been happening in that constructed space for 5000 years. As the camera cut between the tomb interior and the people outside, I wondered why anyone would gamble so grandly on just the chance of that opportunity. All that travel and accommodation for only the potential to watch a bit of light in person? And that’s if the weather holds out? It seemed an odd way to spend money.

Just before the sunrise, all the artificial lights in the tomb were shut off. The camera sat in darkness with the lucky entrants, all standing with their backs to the wall in the little belly of the mound. I watched interestedly, waiting.

When the glimmering beam of sunlight suddenly and decidedly split the dark, I cried. I cried with a heartiness I could never have expected, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. My whole body heaved with a bewildering, awe-filled sob that was miles outside the realm of my control. And as I sat there, crying and surprised, it surprised me more that there wasn’t even room in my head for surprise, because there was only this moment. I was a being and here was the light. I was alive in the splitting dark. The sunlight crept through the black tomb and I cried not because the dark was banished by the light, but because they were together in the tomb, with me.

Later, I wondered if this response was some kind of ancestral sleeper agent instinct. Had this profound, primal wonder been baked into my genetic code thousands of years ago, by thousands of ancestors, and just waited all my life for the trigger of the solstice sun? Did the people in the tomb cry too? Would I have cried if I was actually in the tomb, or would I be too self-conscious stood shoulder to shoulder with strangers?

Ultimately, the why of it all did not seem so important when mostly what I felt after was profound relief. The world and its people are so different now than they were 5000 years ago, when Newgrange was built by farmer-astrologers: I have seen, in my everyday life and whenever I want: the surface of the moon, the sunset on Mars, the colours of stars bursting, the deepest depths of the sea and the bizarrely beautiful creatures who live there, the insides of cells, the secret lives of wild animals in places I will never visit, the kinds of buildings that were incomprehensible only three hundred years ago, the interior of my own body captured by machines, the faces of my loved ones speaking to me even when we are thousands of miles apart! I have seen so much that sometimes I wonder if I am inured against awe, true awe, the true mind-altering, world-shifting sublime kind of AWE.

What an incredible relief to sit on my own sofa, watching a wholly-expected wedge of light move across an ancient floor, and feel my lizard brain reply with only the most involuntary, unhinged, purely reverent reaction. It was not explainable or reasonable and I am so glad. My body saw something – knew something – that my brain has still not caught up to and I couldn’t be more thrilled and grateful to be so moved and confused. After a very fraught year of mostly experiencing horror at witnessing a livestreamed genocide, and becoming reluctantly numbed to it and to all the increasingly bad-from-the-start things happening in the world, I began another year of resistance deeply affirmed that I am still capable of a wild, proportionate, instinctive response to something both so ordinary and utterly tremendous.

I still won’t be entering the lottery for future solstices at Newgrange, but I can’t imagine skipping the moment of the solstice ever again. A day that used to feel like a purely mathematical curiosity in the calendar is now as important to me as it’s parasitical Christian-capitalist successor. If not for the light itself, then at least as the anniversary of the moment I saw it. This year, I don’t expect that I will cry. To have had this kind of awe once is more than enough. But even as I looked at the still image of last year’s livestream – while finding the link for Sunday’s livestream, here for you, if you want it –, my eyes prickled readily.

I hope this coming year holds such a potent kind of awe for you. I hope you get to feel something so hugely joyful that your response is entirely outside your control. I hope, for all of us, that the awe will hold us steady, see us through, and let us build new worlds again and again, as often as they need built, with love and wonder at their core.