Holding the Horizon

I’ve been thinking a lot about the sun recently. While traveling through Puerto Escondido and the jungles of Chiapas, I started noticing how much daily life orients around it. Not symbolically. Practically. The light dictates when people wake, rest, gather, and move.

The sun is so omnipresent that we forget how dominant it truly is. It governs our sleep, our agriculture, our migrations, our energy, our sense of time. We wake with it. We sleep when it disappears (at least we're supposed to). Life on this planet does not negotiate with the sun. It responds.

The Winter Solstice marks the shortest day of the year, when the sun appears to rest on the horizon before beginning its gradual return. For roughly three days, the light seems suspended. Ancient cultures noticed this long before modern astronomy gave it a name. They marked it as a threshold. A pause. A moment of stillness before movement resumed. Many later traditions, including those within Christianity, adopted symbolic narratives that mirror this solar rhythm. Death, waiting, resurrection. The light withdraws. The light returns. The story changes, but the pattern remains the same. The sun rises again, and with it, life reorganizes itself.

Coming back to the United States after three months in Mexico, just after turning thirty-nine, I feel that pause in my own body. A season of inwardness has completed its work. Nothing dramatic. Nothing announced. Just a quiet knowing that something has shifted. As the days lengthen now, I feel myself lengthening with them. More clarity. More confidence. More trust in my own timing. Not because I am forcing growth, but because growth is the natural response to light. I am not entering this season in search of productivity or resolution. I am entering it aligned. About recognizing that power does not arrive as urgency, but as capacity. The light is returning. I am stronger than I was before it left, and I am fully embracing the sun's rise this year.