The Longest Night has Passed

Dissociation, ritual + staying awake in the dark

It is Christmas Eve morning, nearly five a.m., as I write this. I have already celebrated the Winter Solstice—Yule, or whatever name you want to give it. I don’t always know what to call it, and yet it means something very real to me. It is a sacred pause on the wheel of the year, a moment to align with the eternal balancing of the universe. A still point. A turning.

Yesterday, a friend said to me, “It’s like you care completely—and also not at all.” I laughed and said, “Yeah. I’m an Aquarius.” It felt true. And it stayed with me. At one point this statement would have bothered me but now I understand it.

I know this all might seem a little random. And it is. But it also isn’t—like most things. I believe everything happens for a reason. And that some things happen for many reasons at once.

So I’m trying to figure out what I’m really saying here.

It’s Christmas Eve, and the holiday already feels over for me. Not because I don’t believe in Jesus. In fact, I feel a deep resonance with Mary Magdalene—whom I understand not as a whore, but as a priestess, a wife, an embodiment of the Divine Feminine. The narrative of the Virgin Mary, however, deeply frustrates me. What I struggle with is Christianity as a structure. Religion as authority. Belief handed down instead of lived.

Marx said religion is the opium of the people. I understand what he meant—not as an insult, but as a description of dissociation. Opium doesn’t erase reality; it softens it, blurs its edges, creates a dream-state where intensity floats free of consequence.

Sex on opium feels like that too—surreal, unmoored, beautiful in a way that doesn’t quite land in the body. Pleasure without gravity. Experience without attachment. You are there, but not fully there. You care, and you don’t, at the same time.

For a long time, I mistook that state for transcendence. Now I recognize it for what it was: leaving. A gentler exit, perhaps—but still an exit.

My holy moment has already passed.

I built a solstice altar and journeyed alone. In that journey, a flock of blackbirds flew out of my ribcage, leaving a hollow, cavernous opening behind. I fell asleep with the battery-operated candles glowing—don’t worry, I blew the real ones out. I woke in the middle of the night and saw the soft light still burning in the dark room. It felt quietly miraculous.

The next evening, I co-hosted a Winter Solstice ceremony and shamanic journey. We worked with fire, and I led everyone through a fire ritual. We released. We ignited. We listened to the messages of spirit.

Afterward, my husband surprised me. He had walked through the park near our home, collecting a fallen log and a branch of juniper berries—careful not to cut anything living, only gathering what had already been shed. He drilled holes for taper candles and presented it to me in the kitchen– a solstice yule log candle holder. We turned off the lights and watched the flames burn together.

And then, the next day, in the that conversation with my friend something echoed back to me—this idea of caring deeply, and not at all. It made me think about emotional detachment.

For a long time, I thought detachment was the goal. Now I see that much of what I called detachment was actually dissociation. A leaving, a numbing, a way to not be present. I way to both come and go at the same time.

These days, I try something different. I try to let things come to me as they are, without judgment. To let experiences move through me without gripping them. We do not own anyone—any place, any moment, any version of time. We choose our lives. And we choose, on some level, everything in them.

The good. The bad. The unbearable.

We create our reality one breath at a time—not because we are to blame, but because we are here to experience. To learn who we are through what we love and what we resist. And at the end of the day, life is about expansion, not suppression. We are either free or we are not.

The year ahead doesn’t begin for me in January. It begins in spring, when the wheel turns again and the earth remembers how to bloom. Still, something has already shifted. The longest night has passed. Even now, in the depth of winter, the light is slowly returning.

So the question becomes…What will the darkness show us this winter?

I am sitting still inside it. Candle lit—not for hope, not for motivation— but to see. To know. To feel.

🖤 Dana