Winter Solstice, in my own lived cosmology, is the crossroads of conscience.
It has always been a time for me to contemplate ignorance, even when I was ignorant of the need to contemplate it.

Each year I feel the great stretching in my spirit between two worlds. This year it is the splitting of the hemispheres within and without between the denied and the denier, the honoured and dishonoured, the erased and the eraser. This is the gestational darkness that has built since the Summer Solstice, gradually gathering a watching of ravens.

Winter Solstice beckons me and many others onto the cross of cognitive dissonance. I am summoned to stand on the axis between the illusion we’ve invested in and the denial of what we really are, to find a path beyond.

And in the gathering darkness I chose a star.

It was peace.

I never really contemplated peace until this year.
I did not know peace in my life, and I could not see peace in the world, yet I asked to learn.

I will start this story at the end from what I have come to know as the path beyond;

We no longer need to bridge a binary and call that fragile crossing between extremes ‘peace’. The world as she fragments under debt and entitlement has asked only one thing of me; keep my will free. Not to disown it into leaders, into machines, do not give it away to ideologies, expectations or fantasies. Tend the fire of agency, and act from love as practice until no other action can be accommodated by your body.
This is my peacekeeping.

And here is the story of how I found a path of peace in this turning of the earth.

Crucifixion

This, to me is the season of the sun’s crucifixion, and it is followed by a solar rebirth. In these descending days I have walked among the crosses in the constructed world. The painful scoring of truth with illusion, where machine and empire cut the path of natural life and freedom. In the dissonance of truth and illusion, the falseness of this world seems so loud. Here is what I saw;

While hazard lights of flashing reindeer strobing outside stores herd people through the door, Sámi folk resist violation after violation of their 10,000 year migration passage and the lands their reindeer herds graze on.
The word for herd, ‘eallu‘, is almost the same as the word for life in Sámi;
Eallin.
That word in one way or another uttered in knee high snow for thousands of years of hide boots crunching in hoof prints is not of an equivalent dignity it seems, as a suit, a permit, big machines and enough money to briefly placate the earth eaters’ ravenous industry.

On the grounds of a mansion open to the public, there is a dusting of fake snow scattered by the edge of a river; the absurdity of a snowglobe within a simulacrum while actual glaciers thaw. Why is it that, for one short pretense of a winter wonderland, a thousand trees must fall? Micro-plastic must enter the water and the soil? Why must millions of tons of beans for chocolate and coffees be shipped from other climates, warmer ones, ones that our Summers and Autumns are starting to resemble? Who, after all we’ve witnessed in our changing environments, who exactly is this performance for?

I am parked by the massive christmas tree, decorated with string lights, next to the chronically empty playground. Isn’t a tree left in a forest gift enough for all of us now? Is this for the children? This incredibly confusing tradition of tearing down the biggest tree they may have ever seen in order to have it stand at the centre of a village and be largely ignored, uninhabitable to birds or animals due to the electric lights emanating from it? Is this how we show them to honour nature?

In my local town you can see the Manger in Bethlehem without the check-points, the drones, the automatic weapons.
No father is standing at the gable end of the stable with his hands behind his head, while the ass and the ox are stolen by settlers. They’ve spared us the guns pointed at the mother and child.

No soldiers are screaming;

‘Why are you hiding in the stable?’
‘You are hiding terrorists.’
‘These are materials for bombs’
‘You are using your baby as a human shield’

…in the place of a choir.

Everywhere there are crosses. Crosses bearing Palestinian families, crosses bearing animals, birds and fish who are no longer able to eat, mate or migrate safely, there are crosses with indigenous children, elders, languages, with uncontacted tribes, crosses with rivers, with glaciers, with mountains. There are crosses everywhere.
Yet I am meant to see the snow, the fibreglass manger, I am meant to see the lights, I am meant to see the reindeer, and declare everything alright.

When does this end?

This thin illusion of seasons remaining static, goodwill and the consciousness of peace on earth.

For me anyway, it ends now.

I am incredibly bored and tired of being gaslit.
I will not inflict the same on you.

I will not write lies of hope, of delayed responsibility and future salvation.
I want to share something that crumbles all this cognitive dissonance upon itself, now, in this present moment.

I want to offer some agency among the slaughter, to the best of my ability it is to offer.

All Land is Holy

Everywhere is the cradle of creation, and everywhere is the grave. We walk each day among wombs and tombs of all life in the great cycle. There is no place on this planet that is suitable for desecration.

There is only Eden under Ashes.
Only Creation in a Mask.
Only Valhalla behind a Veil,
The Fields of Elysium are Between Each Blade of Grass
The Otherworld is not Elsewhere
And Heaven Stretches Everywhere,
Far Beyond and Beneath the Sky

You are on holy land right now, you are holy land right now, do you desecrate or do you seed peace in the holy land with every movement and action you take.
What cultivates peace within you until what surrounds you becomes sacred again?

Peace

Peace is not a binary of war, peace is the ability to be safely oneself among others.
When conflict arises there are two concluding options which honour the ability to safely be oneself; greater intimacy or respectful separation.
A ceasefire is not peace, it is a treaty of war, a ‘peace-deal’ is not peace it is a contract of war. Respite from conflict is not peace; it is a scrap of anxious rest amidst violence.

As a humanity this is our holy night, our uncertainty, our desperation, our denial of sanctuary, our return to the mammalian and humble to find shelter from genocidal empires.

The birth is now.
The child is you.
The peace is the determination of being at peace with yourself as human, as you truly are, in every moment.

You are peace on earth
when you
simply
are.

We cannot generate a consciousness that we do not embody, speaking of peace is not the same as becoming.

Entitlement is the Antithesis to a Consciousness of Peace

Quite simply; those who are entitled have no free will.

They are enslaved to what they feel they are entitled to.

It does not matter who wears chains, who is in the cage, behind the walls, the fences, it is those who believe that they are owed something that they must get by force or coercion who are truly slaves to what has not been given to them.

Whether it be the rapture, the revenge, the holy lands, the kingdom of heaven, the inheritance, manifest destiny, the perfect partner, the reparations, the promotion, the recognition, the apology, the compensation, even the six counties dare i say it;

Those who live in the consciousness of debt and extractivism will never be free.

As those who are entitled can never truly receive.
We cannot receive what is stolen.
We cannot receive what is coerced.
We cannot receive that which is promised, as that is not how receiving works.

Why can we not receive what is promised? As in the act of promising something has already been claimed. If I promise you an apology, you will feel owed one, and again, entitlement is activated.

What if what is stolen is returned? Can we receive that?
Of course not. For what was stolen is gone, and what will be returned will be different, and what is returned to us must be given to in order to heal it, rather than received.

The Will To Love

We can only receive when we are free.
This was the definition of a ‘free man’, someone who could receive pay, could be chosen as a partner and choose a partner in turn, who could tend a property and receive a harvest from the land.

‘Free’ has its roots as a word in Greek ‘philia’- which means ‘to love’.
‘Freedom’ is the dominion of love, where love is the authority.

So free will is the will of love.

And oh how we love!
True love, the love without condition. Love that is tending and appreciation for what is. Love that does not seek to change someone or something but lives in kinship, in shared story, in lineage with, in care of. Love that it is the labour of living in respect, in harmony, in honesty and without expectation.

Good Will does not Compensate for Free Will

There is no ‘goodness’ that can compensate for coercion, control, or entitlement.
There is no charity that can compensate for the creation of poverty.
No politeness that can allow for the inequity of class.
No compromise that can heal the violation of occupation.

There is nothing we can ‘get’ whether negotiated, stolen, taken or given, that will replace a will that is free.

No false dominion can ever mimic a world where love, and the power self determination in doing as we love, loving and being loved is free.

No amount of indoctrination into rules and regulations, racial discrimination, PR and propaganda, peace-deals and treaties, health programs and reparations parties will ever replace the natural drive in humanity for free will.

How Do We Cultivate Free Will?

We must always ask consent, as to honour the freedom of our own will we must honour the will of others.
Yet we must question who we ask for permission and why, and who feels entitled to gatekeep the means of life?

Authority is an intermediary between you and your own will. If you consent to that authority, then allow it. If you do not consent, cultivate your will and seek direct relationship.
This in many places looks like homesteading, food sovereignty, herbal medicine, direct action… on the spirit level means cultivating a deep autonomous personal relationship with fire, with the ancestors, with the wind, with the world.
The deeper our relationships in beauty, truth and free will, the weaker the oppressor and the life denier and it is our will they coerce in order to control us. Once our will is free, we can no longer be ‘controlled’.

The light I followed was a peace that made me claim my freedom…

I’ve always felt anarchist, rarely ever thought of myself as caged, yet I saw how compromised my will had been in the face of entitlement. Yes my spirit was free, but my time, my body and my attention seemed to be falling into traps of entitlement. And I knew I was falling into them due to some kind of denial, some opportunistic blindness, some belief that I could play this game of tit for tat and come out of it intact.

So the light took me to a dark descent into the parts of humanity that trick, trap and deny life. Down into the roots of the oak tree, into the tangle in the dark, burying me deep in the decaying matter, the humus layer, old skins cast off, minerals assimilated; to meet the bones of a guardian angel who rose with me.

In emergence, there is the welcome of a circle of ancestors around me, their gifts beneath the tree. The ones who were without peace. Lives unlived are now honoured in synchronicities, the awakening of skills and their souls weaving back into the tapestry of humanity, threaded through with joy and beauty; they are born with me.

The journey to the crossroads was clumsy with conflict, and the darkness I have breached more threatening than amniotic, yet as the sermon of ravens who gathered to herald this next incarnation wackle and cruck; I know the light that will christen me will be the light of the star whose path I took.

So may Sámi people follow reindeer where the reindeer wish to go, may whales cross the ocean to safe bays to raise their young, may those who need refuge find passage wherever they must go. May all creatures be free to love and raise families in peace and safety, in the homes of Gaza and Bethlehem, in the snow drifts of the Arctic, in the centre of Dublin city. May we all be free to follow a star in the darkness until we meet a miracle.

Blessings of Winter Solstice, when you emerge from your holy night, may the light of peace be the first to anoint your head and illuminate your eyes; if you will it to be so.

Ghríanstad Faoi Mhaise, Nollaig Shona agus Beirigí Bua ar Lá Féile an Dreoilín,
Saoirse an Mían Ghrá don Shaol Ár Fád

i solas agus síochan,

katie x