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The solstices are for fire. Summer flames say Keep the light alive (it’s never worked, not once). In winter, a more urgent message: Bring light back to life (it’s worked every time so far).

I was overjoyed to find out about this book in time to get it for the winter solstice last week. I really enjoyed Nina MacLaughlin’s Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter some years ago, and I was pleased to have such an event planned for my day: this little book, a batch of hot mulled wine, and my usual solstice/equinox tradition of a backyard fire. At just 80 pages, Winter Solstice is well designed to be read on the single day in question. I am choosing to share many of MacLaughlin’s lovely words here, so my review winds up practically as long as her book (not really…).

It’s an essay in four parts, each longer than the last, plus an afterword, plus an addendum. “Inhale the Darkness” begins: “Two boys strung the lights on houses in Ohio.” It’s a detailed description of that weekend job, the installation of light against darkness. “It’s an old impulse. To honor the dark with festivals of light, to battle it with same.”

Henri Bosco describes this almost-winter moment of the year, “when the world was poised on a pure ridge,” balanced between two seasons, casting “a glance back at the aging autumn, still misty with its wild moods, to contemplate deadly winter from afar.” The misty mood is behind us. We’re looking now at something dark and wilder.

Next, “The Shadows Below the Shadows” surveys traditions across time, Persephone and Demeter, Krampus, Saturnalia, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and Newgrange. It ends: “Pomegranate, holly branch, birch switch, mistletoe. We’ll leaf with life and pass below the secret places of this earth.” I love the way MacLaughlin integrates stories, legends, traditions, and the connections to nature, the plant life they are all in relationship with.

The Eleusinian Mysteries

were meant to elevate people above the human sphere. They were meant to launch them divinewards. As Cicero says: “In very truth we have learned from [the Mysteries] the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with better hope.”

“In Winter We Get Inside Each Other” is about the danger and elemental fear of cold and darkness, and how we deal with those feelings. Describing sledding down a hill on the grounds of an institution for the criminally insane:

…it never felt crazy to cry out, there by yourself, going faster and faster, in your own private moment of fear and glee. Is that what made the lunatics yell inside their cells? Some same combination of soaring down a mountainside unstoppable? I’m happy, I’m afraid, I feel too much, I have to let it out. A cracking open in the descent.

Also sex, sensuality, connection. From a Mary Ruefle poem: “When it snows like this I feel the whole world has joined me in isolation and silence.” (You will have noticed that MacLaughlin makes reference to many others’ wise words.)

“Burn Something Today,” part four of this longform essay, brought me great pleasure as my fire was well underway and I was cozy and warm right up against it, just three or four feet from the remnant snow off to my left, and the page lit up by my headlamp.

Depending on where one lived, the ashes of the solstice fire were then spread on fields over the following days to up the yield of next season’s crops, or fed to cattle to fatten them and boost fertility in the herd, or placed under beds to protect against thunder and lightning, or sometimes worn in a vial around the neck. The lights we string on bushes, that glow on the trees in the center of town–something of these ancient fires lives in them, too. The ancient cults cast shadows in our minds, shift and flicker, their fears are still our fears, down in the darkest places of ourselves.

MacLaughlin’s afterword is “The Timing of the Light,” in which she as a child watched for an approaching car before switching on the electric ‘candle’ in a window, so as to offer hope, light, a bright moment for passersby. “I did not know about conference calls in middle school, but sensed adulthood could be possessed of certain drear.”

The addendum is “Plant Matter,” with a few entries for the plants most important to the winter solstice: holly, blessed thistle, mistletoe, cinnamon, yew, oak. (Others named but not featured: cedar, clove, rosemary, nutmeg, birch, pine, chamomile, juniper, frankincense, and wintergreen. A few of these went into my mulled wine. I considered a chamomile tea before bed but had a beer instead, a kettle sour with cranberry, rosemary, orange peel, salt, and coriander.) In the addendum’s final entry, Oak, which closes the book:

…an end here does not mean the end. The original fire lives in all fire. On the stove and in the hearth, in the bonfire on the beach, surrounded by stones in the woods by a river, in the explosion after the crash, between your ribs and behind your eyes, on the struck tip of the match, on the burning surface of the stars, the source of our fire, and us all. The fire goes out and lives on.

I can’t imagine a better way to observe the changing tide of light and dark. Thank you, Nina.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction, essays, nature, nonfiction |