Turning Toward the Light

by Melissa Moore, Ph.D.

As the universe darkens and the sun sinks earlier each evening, we enter the season that invites an intimate relationship with darkness, solitude, and silence. Many of us are well acquainted with the dark — those sleepless nights when, depleted and restless, we find our minds hunting for things to worry about. This nocturnal vigilance mirrors our annual descent into winter, when the outer world grows quiet and the inner world stirs with unease.

In our discomfort, we may rush to fill the void, decorating, planning, shopping, anything to resist the pull of stillness. Yet the dark season offers us a precious opportunity to pause, descend, and listen. It asks us to take stock of the year now passing, to sit with what is unresolved, and to allow silence to restore our frayed attention in a world saturated with distraction. Raise your gaze in any public space and notice how many of us are bowed to our phones, our modern votive candles to distraction, each dopamine flicker pulling us further from presence.

This is a beautiful time to turn instead toward home — to tend simple, tactile projects that ground us, to cook and craft, to create warmth and meaning close to hearth and heart. For myself, I’ve been in lifelong recovery from Christmas consumerism, determined to unlearn that conditioning before I die. And yet, I love the lights, the gathering, and the shared delight of preparing our home with my husband, our dog and cat, and my niece, who fills the house with youthful creativity.

In our mostly Buddhist household, we celebrate Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas, why not? Gratitude and mindfulness are the true threads that bind them all. How we celebrate, what we buy, eat, and consume deserves attention and care, especially now.

The Winter Solstice is paradox itself: the birth of light within the deepest night. On this day, when the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky, winter is born in the Northern Hemisphere. Here in Colorado, the season also brings its own grounded rituals, changing tires, tucking in the garden, insulating pipes, mundane acts that, when done with awareness, become ceremonies of letting go and renewal. Through these simple gestures, we honor cycles of life and death, reflecting on what has passed, what continues, and what is yet to unfold.

At Karuna Training, we honor these transitions by gathering in circle, listening deeply, witnessing each other’s journeys, and recognizing the light of brilliant sanity that shines through even the darkest times.

Please join me on Sunday, December 21, for our Winter Solstice Ritual, where we’ll lean into the mandala of the Five Buddha Families, reflect on the year gone by, and contemplate our aspirations for the new one. Together, we’ll bear witness to the turning of the light and the renewal of compassion in our shared field of awareness.

Please come along.
With warmth,
Melissa