The year is fading. Light is fading. Solstice means...

The year is fading. Light is fading. Solstice means
sun-stilled. We light candles and raise toasts, we smooch in doorways
under strung-up plants, we hang lights along the roofline peaks, give
gifts, make wishes, laugh and pray and fear. We bring the light into the
earth and try to harness the great forces. It’s a wild sort of
stilling, a thrashing frenzied sort of stilling, a stopping of time, a
de-metering, a holding of the breath as the tension builds, as the dark
expands, until it cracks and light drives in. That’s the hope. The
far-off tinkling of bells you hear could be the harness of the reindeer
or the bells around the neck of a goat. Hoofbeats on the roof, hoofbeats
thudding in the warm and living hollow of your chest. Here in the wild
quiet, something in the shadows whispers and you can’t tell if it means
you good or ill. Pomegranate, holly branch, birch switch, mistletoe.
We’ll leaf with life and pass below the secret places of this earth.

Part Two of my series on the Winter Solstice for the Paris Review.