Happy Solstice

Happy Solstice!

Today we celebrate the first day of Winter, the shortest day of the year, followed by the longest night of the year. Tomorrow the light returns, so to speak, as the days begin to get longer.

It's a time to celebrate earth's cycles, which we are a part of. It's a time of rest and renewal and growth - in this long dark and stillness of winter, where the landscape sleeps.

What is the role and benefit of the long dark nights in our lives?

What blessing can it bring and how can it serve us?

Here is some food for thought, taken from "Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection" by Jessica Prentice:

"In "Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival", anthropologist T.S. Wiley puts forward a provocative hypothesis. She believes that the rise of degenerative diseases in industrialized countries (especially diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and obesity) can be traced to the invention and widespread use of electricity. Her reasoning is that the use of electric lighting, televisions, and computers after the sun goes down (and our consequent ability to stay up later and sleep less) serves to keep our bodies in an artificial state of perpetual summer. This disrupts our natural hormonal functioning and deprives us of a period of semi-hibernation that our pre-agrarian and even many of our agrarian ancestors would have enjoyed: a winter season of long nights and lots of extra sleep.

Wiley believes that this is the cause of our cravings for sugars and carbohydrates. Our ice age hunter-gatherer ancestors would have had, for the most part, access to sugars and carbohydrates during the summer only, and would have lived on proteins and fats throughout the winter. Wiley claims that we crave sugar because our bodies think its summer all the time, and our bodies have evolved to use carbohydrates to store up energy for the long, sugarless winter--a winter that never really comes in our modern, electrically lit world."

Happy solstice friends. Enjoy the winter.