It sure is busy, busy, busy in our tizzywhizzy Western Winter world as we are propelled towards our Year’s End. Time seems to collapse in on itself as our culture propels us forward to the pinnacle of a snap crackle and pop festive Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
On the other hand, it’s also a great time to take a deep breath and get a little bit Crimbo Cosmic. Long evenings are a great time to reflect about who we are and what we share with others across the world. For those of us in busy metropolitan areas, it’s easy to get blinded by bright lights big city and overlook the majesty of elemental cycles and eternal seasonal rhythm and change.
It makes sense why our illustrious forbears set such store by light in the presence of much Winter Darkness. In the absence of modern entertainment and artificial lighting, you’d get a whole lot of mystical introspection-inducing darkness that would require a modicum of magical thinking to get through some very long dark moody nights of the soul.
And so, unsurprisingly, we find that spirituality and religions have extended light appreciation moments during this period. Jews, Christian, Celts and Pagans before us all have festivals of light in the darkest season. Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and some Bhuddists also celebrate Diwalii’s festival of light that confirms and affirms a common impulse for people to face with darkness with light.
As light features heavily in the imaginations during cold, dead of long nights, how better to warm and illuminate a home than with a big old log on an ancient fire. Thus over the Winter Solstice period, an ancient Pagan and Celt tradition of feeding a whole tree to the home hearth fire over 12 days was born. Via a spiritual fire, they were to help their ailing Sun God grow strong again to restore the heat, light and life-giving properties of the returning sun in Spring.
Christians have Advent leading to their Sun God Jesus’s birth. Abundant evergreen Christmas trees and their illuminations signal victory of life and light over death and darkness. Favourite festive food delights, convivial times shared with others and long-awaited gifts are life giving. Jewish folk have Hannukah, or Festival of the Lights, as a remembrance how oil sufficient for only one night, miraculously lasted for eight. This was the clincher to enable the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem after a period of desecration.
British Bakeoff Boffs may well know the origins of the yummy Swiss Rollery Yule Log, but hats of to those who also know that “Yule” comes from the Norse work hweaol, meaning wheel. The sun was seen as a great wheel of fire in the sky for and our ‘wheelcake’ is a reminder of the cyclically inevitable return of fierier times.
And what better wheel logs than those of our friend, the Log Lady in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. How we were transfixed at the messages she recounted emanating from these ‘inanimate’ logs. These repositories of celestial secrets in all their incarnations added other dimensions to our worlds. Psychic possibly, ‘Being John Malkovich’ indubitably, we find John embodying the ‘essence of Log Lady’, bringing it all home for us Twin Peaks afficianados, Ho Ho Ho!
In one of our clairvoyant Lady of the Log proclamations, she divines, “Our world, is nothing but a magical smokescreen” and we are thereby encouraged to introspection and connection. Whichever, if any, ways and means you choose, we wish you well during this festive period en route discovering a Meaning Of Light and Life that works for you.
