The Winter Solstice has a pause at its very heart: the discernible moment between declining sun and rising sun, like the turning point between my inhalation and my exhalation when I am meditating. It’s a moment of suspension when, simultaneously, nothing is happening, and anticipation is infinite. It was a critical moment in the lives of my European ancestors, and they would set the Yule logs ablaze to hold the night at bay. They mourned the sun’s loss, and heralded the sun’s renewal; they honored the ephemeral moment of the turn, and the eternal endurance of the cycle.
The Winter Solstice is a time of holding two things at once.
This year, I am approaching the shortest day with a second star prominent in my thoughts, the North Star of Lace on Race: to lessen and mitigate the harm endured by Black and Brown people, and perpetuated by white people, including myself, and white supremacy. And I have noticed that our walking together here regularly demands that we hold two things at once, too.
Lace on Race approaches the North Star by a strategy of internal growth. We dig through our minds and our histories to uproot the toxic bindweed of white supremacy. We strengthen our ability to set aside our domineering, dominating white perspective, and to instead keep ourselves eye to eye with any and all people. And we establish, within ourselves, higher standards for how we relate to others and how we regulate ourselves, overwriting the white model of tears and excuses, carve-outs and flounces.
Yet while we persistently focus inward to accomplish these things, we absolutely must keep our attention directed to our external praxis, because the work is not about us. It is about Black and Brown people, and reducing the white harm they endure. We aren’t working in order to improve ourselves; that is merely the technique, and we can’t ever allow ourselves to forget it.
Lace has also introduced us to the ethics of kind candor and of hesed. Together, these show us that a strong and healthy love is not merely tender, but also demanding. This love requires grace and accountability, together. It urges gentle compassion and frank honesty, atonement and redemption, together. This love tells us that radical acceptance is ours, forever, and that we must do better, always.
This act of joining a dualism manifests an incredible alchemy. The medieval Chinese philosopher Zhou Dunyi conceived of this in the taijitu, the black and white circle westerners call yin-yang, which is literally “the diagram of the supreme ultimate”. The supreme ultimate: the profound power that is generated when we hold two things at once.
The Winter Solstice is December 21st at 10:03 UT. In this moment when all things are possible, I’ll hold that contemplative pause in my own heart. And this Solstice, when I gather its power for the year to come, I’ll be thinking of Lace, the Lace on Race community, and our commitment to directing that power at racism, in ourselves and wherever we find it.
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