As I searched for the Goddess, I grew frustrated with celebrating religious holidays that I no longer connected with. Books began to cross my path that spoke of the Wheel of the Year and I began working with those magical times. Eventually, a friend and I gathered a group of women together and we created a ceremony for each of the Wheel points: Winter Solstice, Imbolc, Spring Equinox, Beltane, Summer Solstice, Lughnasad, Autumnal Equinox, and Samhain. Honoring the wheel in this way for the first time actively opened me to a greater connection with nature and darkfall items deeply anchored the wheel in my psyche, enlivening it in my life. I began understanding the fluidity of holding a circular/wheel understanding of time rather than a strictly linear one, and the more I worked with the Wheel, the more those revelations continued to show themselves to me.
One of the most potent inner transformations came as I began decorating my tree for Winter Solstice with a magical theme, instead of modeling it after the dcor matching trees of my youth. I brought in a living evergreen tree, which I would later plant in my yard, as a symbol of the everlasting nature of the Goddess. I then connected each aspect of decorating my tree to what I wanted to create in the growing year. I hung gold balls to represent the sun, long strands of silver tinsel to represent rain, and pinecones and nuts to symbolize fertility in all my endeavors. I created ornaments with words such as love, creativity, and happiness and I tied little sparkly bundles of money to the branches. My tree became a place of gratitude for the blessings found in my life both at that moment and for the year ahead.
The Wheel gradually took deep root in my life, and as I worked with it personally I also began facilitating it in workshops. Then a couple of years ago, when I was doing research for another subject, I made a key discovery. I found out that in ancient China, people interested in observing nature placed a pole approximately 8-feet tall in the ground and measured the amount of shadow and light created by the sun over the course of a year. The resulting pattern from these measurements became one of their most sacred symbols - the yin/yang. The sun actually creates the symbol in shadow and light over the course of a year. While I knew the patterns of light and dark changed, I had never seen it as so balanced. You can see on the symbol the movement of the sun as its most extreme dark time in the Northern Hemisphere, Winter Solstice, brings forth the light cycle and as the most extreme light time, Summer Solstice, subtly gives birth to the dark part of the cycle once again. Also, the yin/yang shows the two places where the light and the dark fall into complete balance Darkfall gold sale when the equinoxes occur.
Understanding where this powerful symbol of balance came from assisted me in more deeply understanding the Wheel of the Year and how energies flow throughout the life cycle as well. The cycle of the Wheel and the cycle of life take the same journey-- starting with the dark, fallow time in winter as the earth rests and rejuvenates, moving to the gradual warming of the soil with the light of the sun until it heats enough for planting in the spring, then moving into the full brightness of light during the summer growing time. Then, the light gradually recedes to the fall harvest, and finally diminishes until the crops die and the earth settles in for its period of dark winter rejuvenation once again. For most of us, the cycle of life follows this same pattern as we gestate in the womb's darkness, are born and grow from childhood into adulthood and then into our elder years, moving on to our death and our next expression.
One of the most potent inner transformations came as I began decorating my tree for Winter Solstice with a magical theme, instead of modeling it after the dcor matching trees of my youth. I brought in a living evergreen tree, which I would later plant in my yard, as a symbol of the everlasting nature of the Goddess. I then connected each aspect of decorating my tree to what I wanted to create in the growing year. I hung gold balls to represent the sun, long strands of silver tinsel to represent rain, and pinecones and nuts to symbolize fertility in all my endeavors. I created ornaments with words such as love, creativity, and happiness and I tied little sparkly bundles of money to the branches. My tree became a place of gratitude for the blessings found in my life both at that moment and for the year ahead.
The Wheel gradually took deep root in my life, and as I worked with it personally I also began facilitating it in workshops. Then a couple of years ago, when I was doing research for another subject, I made a key discovery. I found out that in ancient China, people interested in observing nature placed a pole approximately 8-feet tall in the ground and measured the amount of shadow and light created by the sun over the course of a year. The resulting pattern from these measurements became one of their most sacred symbols - the yin/yang. The sun actually creates the symbol in shadow and light over the course of a year. While I knew the patterns of light and dark changed, I had never seen it as so balanced. You can see on the symbol the movement of the sun as its most extreme dark time in the Northern Hemisphere, Winter Solstice, brings forth the light cycle and as the most extreme light time, Summer Solstice, subtly gives birth to the dark part of the cycle once again. Also, the yin/yang shows the two places where the light and the dark fall into complete balance Darkfall gold sale when the equinoxes occur.
Understanding where this powerful symbol of balance came from assisted me in more deeply understanding the Wheel of the Year and how energies flow throughout the life cycle as well. The cycle of the Wheel and the cycle of life take the same journey-- starting with the dark, fallow time in winter as the earth rests and rejuvenates, moving to the gradual warming of the soil with the light of the sun until it heats enough for planting in the spring, then moving into the full brightness of light during the summer growing time. Then, the light gradually recedes to the fall harvest, and finally diminishes until the crops die and the earth settles in for its period of dark winter rejuvenation once again. For most of us, the cycle of life follows this same pattern as we gestate in the womb's darkness, are born and grow from childhood into adulthood and then into our elder years, moving on to our death and our next expression.
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