December 20, 2021 • 40 mins
Across the globe and back to antiquity, this changing of season has been recognized in ritual, story and song. Featuring Carolyn McVickar Edwards, educator and author of the collection The Return of the Light: Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
A centeral is the protection of my heart radio. Tomorrow,
the northern hemisphere will experience the shortest day and longest
night of the year. In our era of electric lights,
high speed travel, and commercially regulated harvests, it might as
(00:27):
well be a blip on the calendar. And yet this moment,
one far end on the spectrum of natural change, hits
all of us somewhere deep, like it has for people
dating back to the beginning. I'm feeling a little thrilled
to be talking about it today because I'm not only
in the midst as we all are, of a seasonal solstice,
(00:51):
but also I think we're in a cultural solstice right now,
where we don't really know what's going to happen, in
this same way that the ancients huddled around Stonehenge didn't
really quite know whether or not the sun would begin
to move again. I'm Caroline McVicker Edwards, and we're going
(01:13):
to get to talk about a book that I wrote
about twenty years ago called The Return of the Light,
Twelve Tales from around the World for the Winter Solstice.
Carolyn is also a lifelong educator. I imagine that you
have spent a lot of time talking to children. That's true.
If you were having a discussion, maybe doing some explanation
(01:37):
to a child about the sun and the changing of
seasons and that drama, how might that conversation go mm hmm.
So every year there's a time. It's summertime, when school
is out, when the days are really long, Right, you're
playing out in the street till nine clock, and you
(02:01):
don't have to come in because it's getting dark, and
it's not cold. In fact, it's hot and the sun
is there all day long for you to swim and play.
And depending on where you are, it might be really
hot and you might have to come in and get
in the shade, but the sun is out. And then
(02:23):
comes Halloween, and Halloween you can tell that by the
time you go trick or treating, it's dark much earlier
than it was in the summer. Halloween is a time
when we think about the dark, we think about the
beginning of the dark. Like we plant a seed inside
(02:45):
of the dirt, and the seed is, of course, the sun.
It's kind of like a Halloween. We're plucking the seed
of the sun out of the sky. It's not there
for us anywhere. We're putting it in the ground. And
it's going to grow again. It we have to plant
it and be in the dark, be with the idea
that death comes and the leaves fall, and all the
(03:10):
fruits that we're on our fruit trees we've now gathered
in and we're eating. And especially if we celebrate the
Day of the Dead, we think about all the people
who came before us that handed down our stories and
our ways of connecting to each other. And then after
(03:30):
Halloween it gets even darker and darker, and people start
putting up lights. And then somewhere after whatever holiday you celebrate,
it might be Christmas, it might be Quands, that might
be Honukkah, then you start noticing, oh, it's getting a
(03:51):
little bit lighter and a little tiny bit lighter every day,
until it's almost like the light has been born, like
it's a little baby. And by February it's kind of
like a teenager. The days are much longer than they
were in December, and then they get longer and longer
and longer, until finally in June the days are as
(04:14):
long as they're going to be all year. If you
live way up high towards the North Pole, the sun
doesn't set at all. It doesn't appear to set. It's
just light all around the clock, and then it gets
darker and darker and darker. The light gets smaller and smaller,
(04:35):
and the dark gets bigger and bigger, and then it
happens all over again the next year. What do we
mean by the word solstice, So it literally means sun
soul stice stands still around what we call the winter solstice,
(04:58):
which is the twenty two December in the northern hemisphere
on the horizon. The sun appears to just sort of
hang there that period of time. Those six days where
the sun does not appear to be moving were terrifying.
If it did not appear to begin to move again,
(05:20):
the light would not lengthen and there would not be
light for crops to grow. So there was all kinds
of rituals that developed, both celebratory but also to teach
the sun to return, and it became a focus of
communal life to encourage the sun and encourage each other.
(05:44):
And we still certainly have remnants of that in all
the Christmas lights, the Hanukah lights, the Quansa lights, and
we speak in the way that people have for a
long time about gathering together and putting away enmity and
taking care of each other and feeding the hungry. We
get really collectively tightened up at this time of year
(06:07):
because it's a scary time of year. For millennia, the
solstice has been formally recognized by cultures across the world,
from the Roman festivals of Brumalia, Saturnalia, and Opalia, the
Chinese dong Gi Yalda, the Persian celebration recognizing the birth
(06:30):
of Mithra, the sun god, and countless others. It seems
that commemorating the beginning of winter is an almost universal tradition. Well,
you know, near the equator, there isn't this big drama
that we experience in both the southern and northern hemispheres
as they move farther towards the poles. But there's always
(06:53):
an experience for human beings of in some way, both
in our personal lives and in our cultural lives, of
not no wing what's coming next, and feeling afraid, and
then this coalescing of community around that. Because we're mammals, right,
we share a kind of a collective nervous system. We
(07:14):
share our anxiety, and we share our calm and doing
things together like singing and dancing and ritual, just being together,
touching shoulders on the couch, putting our arms around our kids,
cooking and eating together. These things are nervous system commerce. Yes,
it is often focused on the sun, but there are
(07:38):
other ways that we metaphorically experience a standing still in
the sense that we don't know what's coming. And I
think that you will find across the world, across cultures,
ways that people come together around asking for help from
(07:58):
the gods, from the power, ways that they come together
around making decisions that are big decisions that affect the group.
And you will find connected with those a sense of
humility and surrender to powers that are greater than the group,
and yet that can be contacted by the group. Caroline's
(08:25):
Winter Solstice collection, The Return of the Light retaels folk
tales and myths that have passed down from cultures around
the world, some of which date back to antiquity. For
the Retellings, it's a process of finding myself in the
story in some way, finding the place where I resonate psychologically,
(08:47):
and then to collect them. It was important for me
in general, is to have some sort of organizing principle.
In this case with this book, it was chaos theory,
which basically says that at the edges of things, it's chaotic,
but it's paradox because if you look at mandel Brock's
(09:10):
designs at the microscopic level, they're these fantastically beautiful patterns.
So it's completely chaotic and there's a pattern. It is
my own overlay, because of course, the ancients did not
talk explicitly about this kind of anxiety. They told stories,
(09:33):
and the stories were not invented by one person. It's
a kind of a mystery how stories rise up and
get told in our past on. But my hypothesis is
these stories are the ancients way of talking about the
chaos at the edge where you don't know what's going on,
and the folk tales address that by using the themes
(09:56):
of theft, surrender, and race. The first selection of four
stories are unified by their theme of theft, the stealing
(10:18):
of the light. It's it's so interesting. I mean, so
many of these stories begin with like in the time
where the world was just dark and like that was
just not working for people. There was somebody that got
fed up and or you know, felt ostracized, it felt
one off, and it was like, okay, I'm gonna I'm
(10:38):
gonna take a leap of faith. I'm gonna do something courageous,
and I'm gonna hatch a crazy scheme and go up
here and steal all of it are a little bit,
or get what I can of this light. Yes, so
it's kind of a celebration of a certain kind of
initiative from the lament Coo Mewalk tribe people indigenous to
the north coast of California round Bodega Bay. Our first
(11:02):
story is why Hummingbird has a red throat. Really, Hummingbird
ends up being the thief, but the story actually begins
with marsh wren Chaka, who is left out of the
group and feels a shame and hunkered down rage that
(11:24):
he's left out, and so he uses his sharp little
beak to punch out the sun, almost as if it
were a bladder. So he pops it like a balloon.
And then coyote gets involved, and the trickster coyote enless
Hummingbird to go and steal some of the light. Hummingbird
(11:46):
is the only one that can get through the tiny
crack in the sky. Swooping in, he steals some of
the sun and as he clutches it against his throat,
he gets that red marking that he doesn't have for
the story birds. The next story is from the Thoria Risa,
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a group of tribal people's in India, and it's the
story of a young girl with a set of beautiful
ear rings. Bearings are classic backed injuries you know who.
Bearings have always been in style, so it's something you
can't go wrong with. A kite, which is like a
kestrel or a hawk rips one of the ear rings
(12:34):
from her ear steals her earring and carries it up
to the otherwise all dark sky and hangs it there
where it becomes the sun gold bearing castabout. In the
(12:55):
next story from the Inuit people of North America, tuopy Lock,
who is sort of a magician, ends up taking the
sun for himself, and then Raven, of course, a very
famous trickster, figures out a way to turn himself into
a feather and to float on the water which is
(13:17):
quoughed down by this beautiful daughter of tuopy Lock, and
she then gives birth to a little baby, who is
of course Raven in disguise, who ends up wailing for
the big bags in which the magician has hung up
the sun and the moon. They give in to him
(13:37):
and Raven takes the light back to his people. So
again it's a trickster kind of energy required to work
here at the Edges. And then finally again from the Arisa,
(14:00):
the sun Cow and the Thief. As a special treat,
we'll have Caroline read the sun Cow in the Thief
later in the episode. After Theft, come Surrender. In my
own process, it feels like I have to sit with
(14:23):
the senses that I have around feeling mugged or that
kind of shocked grief or that kind of perception of loss,
and have to move away from my denial and into
that feeling, and then the next step is to surrender
to it, to just let go without knowing what the
(14:45):
outcome can be. So in the theft stories there's sort
of a resistance to the status quo, and in the
surrender stories there's more of an allowing change to happen,
of saying yes, I need to change, we need to change,
this needs to change, this needs to move, and something
might even have to be broken. The first story in
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that section about Maui, who is also like Raven, a
super famous trickster, a Polynesian trickster. This time the surrender
is actually from the sun itself. His legs are broken.
He's like, okay, okay, okay, I give in, and the
broken legs allow half of the year the sun to
walk slowly across the sky. That next story, which I'm
(15:32):
telling not from the emperor's point of view but from
a tribal point of view, is from the Meut Sioux people's,
who are indigenous peoples of China. It posits that there
are six sons which are burning the earth up. This
very thoughtful warrior realizes that the suns cannot be shot
(15:55):
out of the sky, as the other warriors are trying
to do. But there's this as a of so below moment.
Instead of shooting the sun's out of the sky, he
finds their reflection in water and shoots them out of
the water. And then only one son is left, but
grieving his brother's hides in a cave, and of course
(16:16):
we have the sun again refusing to come out or
being resistant. But then the crowing of the rooster outside
the caves door enchants the sun into coming out. So
the sun surrenders in a sweet way. In that story,
instead of like okay, okay, I give in. It's like, whoa,
what is this beautiful music outside? What is this crowing?
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And then the sun comes all the way out and
lights things up again. It seems to me that there's people,
maybe myself being one, that would take issue at the
sun on that point. It's like, should you have maybe
like listen to a little bit more rooster crowing before
you went with that is your wake up song that's
been driving peoples for ages. But along with these eleven
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folk tns, Caroline decided to include one myth. The North
Smith poses Light as a beautiful young man and his brother,
who is Darkness, is blind Balder, the god of Light,
has a dream that he will die, and so the
(17:27):
whole story revolves around the frantic work of the gods
and goddesses to keep this beautiful young man alive. And Loki,
of course, is the trickster, and he's jealous of all
the attention the god of Light is getting, and so
he arranges to trick blind Hode, the twin of Light
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the Dark, into accidentally killing his brother. Loki finds out
that Mistletoe is the one being on earth not already
exhorted not to hurt poor Balder, the god of Light,
because everybody thinks that mistletoe is too weak to do
any harm anyway. But in Loki's hand, and he puts
(18:11):
it into the god of Darkness's hand, it does harm Balder,
and Balder dies, his wife dies of grief. And this
is the epic level. The whole world collapses because there
is no light. You find terrible destruction in North Smith's
and it was a very harsh place on the planet
(18:32):
to live. Loki is punished, and then finally, out of
the ashes comes Balder again, light free from the underworld,
and I love this part. The only two humans left
in the Middle world, between the Upper world and the
lower world, the two who had hidden themselves away, came
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out into this new light. Their names were Life and
the Stubborn Will to Live. The gods and goddesses. Then
the ones who were left gathered together on the sunlit
plane of the Upper World, home of the Wind, shyly, joyfully.
They clung to the returning couple, even as Life and
(19:14):
Stubborn Will to Live had clung to each other in
the Middle World. The gods and goddesses sifted through the
wreckage of their great Hall in the ruins, they found
the golden chess pieces with which they had once amused themselves. Slowly, slowly,
they began to play again. So there's the two characters
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of life and the stubborn will to live? What do
those mean? Do you? How do you separate those two things? Oh? Well,
I guess one feels like, you know, you picture the
grass coming up through the cement sidewalk crack, you know
that life will out. There's that amazing book about the
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abandoned land at Chernobyl, which had that terrible nuclear accident
thirty years ago. Now no humans live there, but it's
just a vibrating with life because humans have kept their
hands off at all this time. And then the stubborn
will to live feels like it's a very human thing,
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or maybe it's just a sentient being thing that there
is inside of animals and people and maybe the planet itself.
There is this will towards life. So the one seems
like a force that is completely mysterious, and the other
seems like more of an emotional response to that force.
(20:44):
The last story in the surrender section is this really
sweet story from the Sukumba people of Tanzania about these
three little, tiny animals. Once again, you this theme of
you need to be small to get through the crack,
to get to the other side where their son is.
(21:07):
In this case, it's not a theft. It's the three
little animals working together in order to outwit the sky
people who are refusing to give away their light. In particular,
Fly very reluctantly agrees to work with Spider, at first
saying like, no, I'm not working with Spider polic you know,
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Spider will eat me, and then being reminded like, you know,
the overarching theme here is we have to work together,
and so Fly surrenders to that bigger call, the Harambi
call of we have to work together, we have to
pull together here, and thus manages to work with his
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enemy to get light, and after surrender comes grace. We
all know that sometimes something just comes to us that
has nothing to do with our will. We may have
asked for help. That's part of the surrender of like okay,
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I need help, but we get more than we asked for.
We get held in a way that we couldn't have imagined.
I mean, in the smallest ways. There's this sense that
there is a way that we're taken care of that
is bigger than anything that we can plan. That first
one is from the Kung Sun people in the Kalahari Desert.
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The Kung Sun call everybody like dog people and people
be people mongoose people, because they recognize the relational nous
of all of us to each other. In this one,
Grandfather Mantus starts off trying to solve the cold and
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dark problem. It's Grandfather Manis who tells them to go
to sun Man, who's fallen asleep. He's heaved into the
air and hot, beautiful light cores from his armpits. Any
person keep me trying, No, sir, you don't do what
I do. One stay dry. Sun Man, mon Goose shouted,
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you must go up high in the sky. You must
make heat and life for us, so we will no
longer be cold, and so the whole earth will have day.
Sun Man heard, He let himself, so there's that grace
moment for all of us. He let himself grow hottest
fire and let his tumbling turn him round as a ball.
That day, sun Man became a bright circle of heat
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up high in the sky. Grandfather Mantis was proud. He
tapped his old brown tooth. Look man is equal to me,
who but I have them magic thin legs, shuffling in
the dust and head nodding. He began a gay and
boastful dance. And then you have the girl who married
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the son from the Luya people of Kenya and Uganda.
The Sun lives on the other side of the sky
and gets very interested in this beautiful young woman who
is lost in the woods. She's runaway, she doesn't want
to marry, and this rope descends from heaven and she
doesn't even notice it at first, but it's just dangling there,
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and she grasps it. She's lifted up into the land
of the Sun. He, in order to woo her, gives
her his rays shut up in a vessel, and she
ends up taking the lid off that vessel so that
it pours down to her people below. Sometimes the most
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gracious gift of all is an empty box. Let us
borrow empty vessels, said Master chart century German mystic. And
the et reat box, which in the next story is
called the light Keeper's box, could be such a vessel,
pouring out the spaciousness into which the new can flow.
(25:23):
So there's that grace again of being willing to give
away without any promise of return, and there is no promise. Really,
you might give away and not get grace. But there's
something in the giving away that moistens I love. That
line moistens the spirits of all beings with generosity and cooperation.
(25:46):
The Lightkeeper's Box, which is from the Wadau people in Venezuela,
that's a wonderful story about gift culture, giving things away
rather than selling things, what anthropologist called commodity culture. That
basically is a story about this chief sending each of
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his daughter's out to find the light keeper. The first
one stays with deer, and the second one finds the
light keeper, but there's arrows in both of them, which
is again grace. Take the romance part out of it.
It's about love and connection. Finally, the et red box
and it's light get hurled into the sky, but it's
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moving too fast, and so the chief sends turtle up
to befriend the light and because turtle moves slowly, Sun
has to slow down and wait for turtle. This is
of course from an equatorial region that moves at turtles pace,
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as the end of the story says, so that the
day lasts just long enough until the night comes to
the world by the Orinoco River on this war empty dream.
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And then Labe Fauna and the Royal Child of Light.
So Italy has the counterpart to Santa Claus, an old
witchy woman who rides a broom called labe Fauna, and
she rides around each year looking for the child of Light.
And she leaves sweeps at every house in case the
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child inside is the child who will light up the world.
That's again that kind of grace, like it isn't just
one child stick around after the break to hear Caroline
read a couple of selections from her book. Can I
(28:03):
read you a paragraph? You can read me anything, alright,
you can read me the whole book. Collected here, one
for each of the twelve days that, for so long
bridged one light cycle with another. Are my retellings of
twelve traditional stories about light from all over the world.
(28:25):
Not all these tales are literally about the winter solstice,
though some are, but each illuminates our fundamental connection to
light and its cycles of birth, death, and regeneration. Each
crystallizes the significance of light's return each year. Like vessels,
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the stories carry us across the stormy, flotsamy slippery edge
of night. We cross over in three different ways, by theft,
by surrender, through grace. There are four stories for each
kind of crossing. When our personalities clutch their old habits,
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the thief may have to grab what we otherwise won't
let go. When are so functional egos find their orders
scuttled some other deeper self finally surrenders to the new.
And then there are those miraculous gifts, those blessings that
shower down upon us. Read the stories aloud in company
(29:36):
by candlelight, play the games, make the rights sing, the songs,
revel together with the animals and the villagers snuggle in
the egg of the dark. You published and never wanted
you to do an audiobook of this book on tape.
It would be fun, wouldn't it. I was looking for
(30:00):
when I came across your book, I was like, this
gotta it's gotta be. But that's a great idea. If
you were going to read a story, I have to
that that I would that I would ask you to
just choose which one you'd like to do. I don't know,
if I don't know, if there's all be surprises to
you or not. But the two that that I would
be happy with with either one of are The Sun
(30:21):
Coow and the Thief or the Pull Together Morning. Well,
you know, I would love to read The Sun Cow
and the Thief because it's sort of told in almost
like an intantery way, like almost like a chant. Is
there anything context wise about that story that we need
(30:42):
to set up, like any terms or anything. Obviously, the
Cow has a particular significance in India. It is even
though it is a tribal story and so thus it's
not part of Hinduism, it does borrow from the Hindu
neighbors in that the Hindu tell the story of Surya,
the on god born from the heavenly cow a d t.
(31:04):
And so there is this cultural overlap and borrowing they're
implied in the story. The Orisa have the largest variety
of tribal communities on the ethnographic map of India. The
Kutia cond arc farmers who specialize in the soulful craft
(31:25):
of wood carving. Like other Oresa. They have at the
core of their communal strength the village council and the dormitory.
The dormitory is the largest hut three sided, open in front,
hung with musical instruments and decorated with symbols of the
animal spirits. When the workday is done, it is the
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site for the gathering of everyone in the village for
the dance. It functions as a kind of school of
dance for youngsters growing into tribal traditions, and it is
the meeting place where the elders of the village council,
who make decisions affecting every social, economic, and religious part
of life. The Arisa borrow from their Hindu neighbors, and
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their neighbors borrow from them. The Hindu tell the story
of Surya, the sun god, born from the heavenly cow Aditi.
The Hindi word for cow go also means ray of
dawn or ray of spiritual illumination. The sun cow and
(32:37):
the thief. Back at the beginning, the village was like
a hinged box with many sides. A lonely man stood
on the outside. Looking in through the cracks. He could
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see rightly colored crisscross lines everywhere. People walked to and
fro along the lines, carving shapes and painting shimmering colors
as they went. The man saw an order so neat
and easy. It seemed he should have been able to
slide right in, the very blood in his body, singing.
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But something was wrong with him, with the way things were,
he could not get in. It was as if the
village had no doors, only cracks. He could only look,
never touch. He would always be on the outside, looking in.
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Round the edges of the box, the sun cow walked
round and round its perfect side. She walked, milking out
her light in the day, filling the village box with
color and warmth. At she chewed her cut her black sides,
giving quiet warmth but no light. The man stood between
(34:08):
sun cow in the village. The only warmth that the
man could touch was sun cow herself. Whenever those inside
the village looked out, they saw only their son cow,
that lovely black heat that night tour, that daymaker. They
(34:29):
smacked their lips with the cream of it. They did
not say, look at that nice man standing outside looking in.
How silly that he stands alone at the edge, when
we could simply make a place for him in our
village of carvings, of shapes and colors. Come, sir, you
are welcome. They didn't say that. They didn't even see him,
(34:54):
And so The man waited for the sun cow every day,
waited for her her to pass him by. He smelled
her musky flanks, saw her soft eyes, and touched her
velvet hot muzzle. By some mysterious pressure, her light honey
milk poured out from her utter. The man could feel
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the pressure of his own sadness inside him all at once.
One day, the man decided to take the sun cow
for himself. When all the pretty village people could not
have her anymore, then finally everything might be fair. So
he waited for her, not even bothering to hide. The
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village people could not see him after all, and she
had walked sweetly near him, nonchalant, every day of his life.
The day he stole sun Cow, he simply tossed a
noose over her head and pulled her away away over
the edge of the world, away from the box, away
from all the can't get in. Away alone to the edge,
(36:03):
the lights and colors in the village plunged into darkness.
Without sun Cow's milk, there was only night. The people
could not see. Babies cried, unfound and unfed by their mothers.
No one knew when to wake up, when to work.
All the order lay like unswept wood scraps in a
(36:25):
dark room. The tidy lines were lumped and smudged, The
colors disappeared. Where had their sun Cow gone? What had
become of her? They waited in sorrow and fear. The
thief was having his own problems. At the beginning, he
luxuriated in the warmth of sun Cow's solidity, in her rhythmical,
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grassy breath. But away from her circling walk around the
little box world, away from her habits, no light came
from her utter, And because she would not let him
milk her, it was night for him too. No one
else had her, But now he didn't have her either.
(37:12):
When the thief, in desperation, tried to set beneath her
a pail and squeeze her teeths, she kicked the pail
away with such certain force that he feared that she
would kick him too, should he persist. She was only
trying to save his life, of course, for just think
what would happen to a single person who tried to
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milk the sun. The thief held his head in his
hands for ever so long he sat, hoping for her
light again, longing for a sign that he might milk her.
Finally he knew he could not keep her anymore. He
leaned against her for goodbye, for a final giving in
(37:56):
to going back to the endless looking in and never having.
Then he slipped the noose from its steak and from
over her head, and set the sun cow free. But
she did not return to her circling walk around the village. Instead,
she leapt up high, joyously high up over the moon.
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Now she walks not just around one village, but in
a vast sky circle, around all the villages, around the
circle of the whole world, so that no one now
needs simply look in without being part, without being seen.
Everywhere there are doors, carved intersections, lines criss crossing that
(38:46):
can be walked in and about, shivering and shining with color.
Everywhere there is light. You know, it's so interesting. There's
a theft, obviously, the theft of the cow, and then
the thief surrenders the cow. Eventually he realizes that it's fruitless.
(39:11):
And then there's a grace of the cow not going
back into the pen, but going into the sky and
giving that sort of profound gift, like something that you
couldn't have even known to ask for. Yes, you picked
exactly the story that has all three in it, didn't you.
I just got lucky. I think we'll call that another
(39:32):
little bit of gracer serendipity. Yeah. This episode of Ephemeral
was written and assembled by Alex Williams, with producers Max
Williams and Trevor Young. The book we discussed today is
The Return of the Light, twelve tales from around the
(39:54):
world for the winter Solstice. Caroline has also authored the
collections Sun Story In the Light of the Moon and
The Storyteller's Goddess. Find them wherever books are sold and
learn more at Caroline mc vickar edwards dot com. Links
and more at our website Ephemeral dot Show. And however
(40:16):
you celebrate, I hope your Solstice is full of warmth,
light and grace
A centeral is the protection of my heart radio. Tomorrow,
the northern hemisphere will experience the shortest day and longest
night of the year. In our era of electric lights,
high speed travel, and commercially regulated harvests, it might as
(00:27):
well be a blip on the calendar. And yet this moment,
one far end on the spectrum of natural change, hits
all of us somewhere deep, like it has for people
dating back to the beginning. I'm feeling a little thrilled
to be talking about it today because I'm not only
in the midst as we all are, of a seasonal solstice,
(00:51):
but also I think we're in a cultural solstice right now,
where we don't really know what's going to happen, in
this same way that the ancients huddled around Stonehenge didn't
really quite know whether or not the sun would begin
to move again. I'm Caroline McVicker Edwards, and we're going
(01:13):
to get to talk about a book that I wrote
about twenty years ago called The Return of the Light,
Twelve Tales from around the World for the Winter Solstice.
Carolyn is also a lifelong educator. I imagine that you
have spent a lot of time talking to children. That's true.
If you were having a discussion, maybe doing some explanation
(01:37):
to a child about the sun and the changing of
seasons and that drama, how might that conversation go mm hmm.
So every year there's a time. It's summertime, when school
is out, when the days are really long, Right, you're
playing out in the street till nine clock, and you
(02:01):
don't have to come in because it's getting dark, and
it's not cold. In fact, it's hot and the sun
is there all day long for you to swim and play.
And depending on where you are, it might be really
hot and you might have to come in and get
in the shade, but the sun is out. And then
(02:23):
comes Halloween, and Halloween you can tell that by the
time you go trick or treating, it's dark much earlier
than it was in the summer. Halloween is a time
when we think about the dark, we think about the
beginning of the dark. Like we plant a seed inside
(02:45):
of the dirt, and the seed is, of course, the sun.
It's kind of like a Halloween. We're plucking the seed
of the sun out of the sky. It's not there
for us anywhere. We're putting it in the ground. And
it's going to grow again. It we have to plant
it and be in the dark, be with the idea
that death comes and the leaves fall, and all the
(03:10):
fruits that we're on our fruit trees we've now gathered
in and we're eating. And especially if we celebrate the
Day of the Dead, we think about all the people
who came before us that handed down our stories and
our ways of connecting to each other. And then after
(03:30):
Halloween it gets even darker and darker, and people start
putting up lights. And then somewhere after whatever holiday you celebrate,
it might be Christmas, it might be Quands, that might
be Honukkah, then you start noticing, oh, it's getting a
(03:51):
little bit lighter and a little tiny bit lighter every day,
until it's almost like the light has been born, like
it's a little baby. And by February it's kind of
like a teenager. The days are much longer than they
were in December, and then they get longer and longer
and longer, until finally in June the days are as
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long as they're going to be all year. If you
live way up high towards the North Pole, the sun
doesn't set at all. It doesn't appear to set. It's
just light all around the clock, and then it gets
darker and darker and darker. The light gets smaller and smaller,
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and the dark gets bigger and bigger, and then it
happens all over again the next year. What do we
mean by the word solstice, So it literally means sun
soul stice stands still around what we call the winter solstice,
(04:58):
which is the twenty two December in the northern hemisphere
on the horizon. The sun appears to just sort of
hang there that period of time. Those six days where
the sun does not appear to be moving were terrifying.
If it did not appear to begin to move again,
(05:20):
the light would not lengthen and there would not be
light for crops to grow. So there was all kinds
of rituals that developed, both celebratory but also to teach
the sun to return, and it became a focus of
communal life to encourage the sun and encourage each other.
(05:44):
And we still certainly have remnants of that in all
the Christmas lights, the Hanukah lights, the Quansa lights, and
we speak in the way that people have for a
long time about gathering together and putting away enmity and
taking care of each other and feeding the hungry. We
get really collectively tightened up at this time of year
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because it's a scary time of year. For millennia, the
solstice has been formally recognized by cultures across the world,
from the Roman festivals of Brumalia, Saturnalia, and Opalia, the
Chinese dong Gi Yalda, the Persian celebration recognizing the birth
(06:30):
of Mithra, the sun god, and countless others. It seems
that commemorating the beginning of winter is an almost universal tradition. Well,
you know, near the equator, there isn't this big drama
that we experience in both the southern and northern hemispheres
as they move farther towards the poles. But there's always
(06:53):
an experience for human beings of in some way, both
in our personal lives and in our cultural lives, of
not no wing what's coming next, and feeling afraid, and
then this coalescing of community around that. Because we're mammals, right,
we share a kind of a collective nervous system. We
(07:14):
share our anxiety, and we share our calm and doing
things together like singing and dancing and ritual, just being together,
touching shoulders on the couch, putting our arms around our kids,
cooking and eating together. These things are nervous system commerce. Yes,
it is often focused on the sun, but there are
(07:38):
other ways that we metaphorically experience a standing still in
the sense that we don't know what's coming. And I
think that you will find across the world, across cultures,
ways that people come together around asking for help from
(07:58):
the gods, from the power, ways that they come together
around making decisions that are big decisions that affect the group.
And you will find connected with those a sense of
humility and surrender to powers that are greater than the group,
and yet that can be contacted by the group. Caroline's
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Winter Solstice collection, The Return of the Light retaels folk
tales and myths that have passed down from cultures around
the world, some of which date back to antiquity. For
the Retellings, it's a process of finding myself in the
story in some way, finding the place where I resonate psychologically,
(08:47):
and then to collect them. It was important for me
in general, is to have some sort of organizing principle.
In this case with this book, it was chaos theory,
which basically says that at the edges of things, it's chaotic,
but it's paradox because if you look at mandel Brock's
(09:10):
designs at the microscopic level, they're these fantastically beautiful patterns.
So it's completely chaotic and there's a pattern. It is
my own overlay, because of course, the ancients did not
talk explicitly about this kind of anxiety. They told stories,
(09:33):
and the stories were not invented by one person. It's
a kind of a mystery how stories rise up and
get told in our past on. But my hypothesis is
these stories are the ancients way of talking about the
chaos at the edge where you don't know what's going on,
and the folk tales address that by using the themes
(09:56):
of theft, surrender, and race. The first selection of four
stories are unified by their theme of theft, the stealing
(10:18):
of the light. It's it's so interesting. I mean, so
many of these stories begin with like in the time
where the world was just dark and like that was
just not working for people. There was somebody that got
fed up and or you know, felt ostracized, it felt
one off, and it was like, okay, I'm gonna I'm
(10:38):
gonna take a leap of faith. I'm gonna do something courageous,
and I'm gonna hatch a crazy scheme and go up
here and steal all of it are a little bit,
or get what I can of this light. Yes, so
it's kind of a celebration of a certain kind of
initiative from the lament Coo Mewalk tribe people indigenous to
the north coast of California round Bodega Bay. Our first
(11:02):
story is why Hummingbird has a red throat. Really, Hummingbird
ends up being the thief, but the story actually begins
with marsh wren Chaka, who is left out of the
group and feels a shame and hunkered down rage that
(11:24):
he's left out, and so he uses his sharp little
beak to punch out the sun, almost as if it
were a bladder. So he pops it like a balloon.
And then coyote gets involved, and the trickster coyote enless
Hummingbird to go and steal some of the light. Hummingbird
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is the only one that can get through the tiny
crack in the sky. Swooping in, he steals some of
the sun and as he clutches it against his throat,
he gets that red marking that he doesn't have for
the story birds. The next story is from the Thoria Risa,
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a group of tribal people's in India, and it's the
story of a young girl with a set of beautiful
ear rings. Bearings are classic backed injuries you know who.
Bearings have always been in style, so it's something you
can't go wrong with. A kite, which is like a
kestrel or a hawk rips one of the ear rings
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from her ear steals her earring and carries it up
to the otherwise all dark sky and hangs it there
where it becomes the sun gold bearing castabout. In the
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next story from the Inuit people of North America, tuopy Lock,
who is sort of a magician, ends up taking the
sun for himself, and then Raven, of course, a very
famous trickster, figures out a way to turn himself into
a feather and to float on the water which is
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quoughed down by this beautiful daughter of tuopy Lock, and
she then gives birth to a little baby, who is
of course Raven in disguise, who ends up wailing for
the big bags in which the magician has hung up
the sun and the moon. They give in to him
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and Raven takes the light back to his people. So
again it's a trickster kind of energy required to work
here at the Edges. And then finally again from the Arisa,
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the sun Cow and the Thief. As a special treat,
we'll have Caroline read the sun Cow in the Thief
later in the episode. After Theft, come Surrender. In my
own process, it feels like I have to sit with
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the senses that I have around feeling mugged or that
kind of shocked grief or that kind of perception of loss,
and have to move away from my denial and into
that feeling, and then the next step is to surrender
to it, to just let go without knowing what the
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outcome can be. So in the theft stories there's sort
of a resistance to the status quo, and in the
surrender stories there's more of an allowing change to happen,
of saying yes, I need to change, we need to change,
this needs to change, this needs to move, and something
might even have to be broken. The first story in
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that section about Maui, who is also like Raven, a
super famous trickster, a Polynesian trickster. This time the surrender
is actually from the sun itself. His legs are broken.
He's like, okay, okay, okay, I give in, and the
broken legs allow half of the year the sun to
walk slowly across the sky. That next story, which I'm
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telling not from the emperor's point of view but from
a tribal point of view, is from the Meut Sioux people's,
who are indigenous peoples of China. It posits that there
are six sons which are burning the earth up. This
very thoughtful warrior realizes that the suns cannot be shot
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out of the sky, as the other warriors are trying
to do. But there's this as a of so below moment.
Instead of shooting the sun's out of the sky, he
finds their reflection in water and shoots them out of
the water. And then only one son is left, but
grieving his brother's hides in a cave, and of course
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we have the sun again refusing to come out or
being resistant. But then the crowing of the rooster outside
the caves door enchants the sun into coming out. So
the sun surrenders in a sweet way. In that story,
instead of like okay, okay, I give in. It's like, whoa,
what is this beautiful music outside? What is this crowing?
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And then the sun comes all the way out and
lights things up again. It seems to me that there's people,
maybe myself being one, that would take issue at the
sun on that point. It's like, should you have maybe
like listen to a little bit more rooster crowing before
you went with that is your wake up song that's
been driving peoples for ages. But along with these eleven
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folk tns, Caroline decided to include one myth. The North
Smith poses Light as a beautiful young man and his brother,
who is Darkness, is blind Balder, the god of Light,
has a dream that he will die, and so the
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whole story revolves around the frantic work of the gods
and goddesses to keep this beautiful young man alive. And Loki,
of course, is the trickster, and he's jealous of all
the attention the god of Light is getting, and so
he arranges to trick blind Hode, the twin of Light
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the Dark, into accidentally killing his brother. Loki finds out
that Mistletoe is the one being on earth not already
exhorted not to hurt poor Balder, the god of Light,
because everybody thinks that mistletoe is too weak to do
any harm anyway. But in Loki's hand, and he puts
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it into the god of Darkness's hand, it does harm Balder,
and Balder dies, his wife dies of grief. And this
is the epic level. The whole world collapses because there
is no light. You find terrible destruction in North Smith's
and it was a very harsh place on the planet
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to live. Loki is punished, and then finally, out of
the ashes comes Balder again, light free from the underworld,
and I love this part. The only two humans left
in the Middle world, between the Upper world and the
lower world, the two who had hidden themselves away, came
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out into this new light. Their names were Life and
the Stubborn Will to Live. The gods and goddesses. Then
the ones who were left gathered together on the sunlit
plane of the Upper World, home of the Wind, shyly, joyfully.
They clung to the returning couple, even as Life and
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Stubborn Will to Live had clung to each other in
the Middle World. The gods and goddesses sifted through the
wreckage of their great Hall in the ruins, they found
the golden chess pieces with which they had once amused themselves. Slowly, slowly,
they began to play again. So there's the two characters
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of life and the stubborn will to live? What do
those mean? Do you? How do you separate those two things? Oh? Well,
I guess one feels like, you know, you picture the
grass coming up through the cement sidewalk crack, you know
that life will out. There's that amazing book about the
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abandoned land at Chernobyl, which had that terrible nuclear accident
thirty years ago. Now no humans live there, but it's
just a vibrating with life because humans have kept their
hands off at all this time. And then the stubborn
will to live feels like it's a very human thing,
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or maybe it's just a sentient being thing that there
is inside of animals and people and maybe the planet itself.
There is this will towards life. So the one seems
like a force that is completely mysterious, and the other
seems like more of an emotional response to that force.
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The last story in the surrender section is this really
sweet story from the Sukumba people of Tanzania about these
three little, tiny animals. Once again, you this theme of
you need to be small to get through the crack,
to get to the other side where their son is.
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In this case, it's not a theft. It's the three
little animals working together in order to outwit the sky
people who are refusing to give away their light. In particular,
Fly very reluctantly agrees to work with Spider, at first
saying like, no, I'm not working with Spider polic you know,
(21:36):
Spider will eat me, and then being reminded like, you know,
the overarching theme here is we have to work together,
and so Fly surrenders to that bigger call, the Harambi
call of we have to work together, we have to
pull together here, and thus manages to work with his
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enemy to get light, and after surrender comes grace. We
all know that sometimes something just comes to us that
has nothing to do with our will. We may have
asked for help. That's part of the surrender of like okay,
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I need help, but we get more than we asked for.
We get held in a way that we couldn't have imagined.
I mean, in the smallest ways. There's this sense that
there is a way that we're taken care of that
is bigger than anything that we can plan. That first
one is from the Kung Sun people in the Kalahari Desert.
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The Kung Sun call everybody like dog people and people
be people mongoose people, because they recognize the relational nous
of all of us to each other. In this one,
Grandfather Mantus starts off trying to solve the cold and
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dark problem. It's Grandfather Manis who tells them to go
to sun Man, who's fallen asleep. He's heaved into the
air and hot, beautiful light cores from his armpits. Any
person keep me trying, No, sir, you don't do what
I do. One stay dry. Sun Man, mon Goose shouted,
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you must go up high in the sky. You must
make heat and life for us, so we will no
longer be cold, and so the whole earth will have day.
Sun Man heard, He let himself, so there's that grace
moment for all of us. He let himself grow hottest
fire and let his tumbling turn him round as a ball.
That day, sun Man became a bright circle of heat
(23:49):
up high in the sky. Grandfather Mantis was proud. He
tapped his old brown tooth. Look man is equal to me,
who but I have them magic thin legs, shuffling in
the dust and head nodding. He began a gay and
boastful dance. And then you have the girl who married
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the son from the Luya people of Kenya and Uganda.
The Sun lives on the other side of the sky
and gets very interested in this beautiful young woman who
is lost in the woods. She's runaway, she doesn't want
to marry, and this rope descends from heaven and she
doesn't even notice it at first, but it's just dangling there,
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and she grasps it. She's lifted up into the land
of the Sun. He, in order to woo her, gives
her his rays shut up in a vessel, and she
ends up taking the lid off that vessel so that
it pours down to her people below. Sometimes the most
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gracious gift of all is an empty box. Let us
borrow empty vessels, said Master chart century German mystic. And
the et reat box, which in the next story is
called the light Keeper's box, could be such a vessel,
pouring out the spaciousness into which the new can flow.
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So there's that grace again of being willing to give
away without any promise of return, and there is no promise. Really,
you might give away and not get grace. But there's
something in the giving away that moistens I love. That
line moistens the spirits of all beings with generosity and cooperation.
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The Lightkeeper's Box, which is from the Wadau people in Venezuela,
that's a wonderful story about gift culture, giving things away
rather than selling things, what anthropologist called commodity culture. That
basically is a story about this chief sending each of
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his daughter's out to find the light keeper. The first
one stays with deer, and the second one finds the
light keeper, but there's arrows in both of them, which
is again grace. Take the romance part out of it.
It's about love and connection. Finally, the et red box
and it's light get hurled into the sky, but it's
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moving too fast, and so the chief sends turtle up
to befriend the light and because turtle moves slowly, Sun
has to slow down and wait for turtle. This is
of course from an equatorial region that moves at turtles pace,
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as the end of the story says, so that the
day lasts just long enough until the night comes to
the world by the Orinoco River on this war empty dream.
(27:10):
And then Labe Fauna and the Royal Child of Light.
So Italy has the counterpart to Santa Claus, an old
witchy woman who rides a broom called labe Fauna, and
she rides around each year looking for the child of Light.
And she leaves sweeps at every house in case the
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child inside is the child who will light up the world.
That's again that kind of grace, like it isn't just
one child stick around after the break to hear Caroline
read a couple of selections from her book. Can I
(28:03):
read you a paragraph? You can read me anything, alright,
you can read me the whole book. Collected here, one
for each of the twelve days that, for so long
bridged one light cycle with another. Are my retellings of
twelve traditional stories about light from all over the world.
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Not all these tales are literally about the winter solstice,
though some are, but each illuminates our fundamental connection to
light and its cycles of birth, death, and regeneration. Each
crystallizes the significance of light's return each year. Like vessels,
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the stories carry us across the stormy, flotsamy slippery edge
of night. We cross over in three different ways, by theft,
by surrender, through grace. There are four stories for each
kind of crossing. When our personalities clutch their old habits,
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the thief may have to grab what we otherwise won't
let go. When are so functional egos find their orders
scuttled some other deeper self finally surrenders to the new.
And then there are those miraculous gifts, those blessings that
shower down upon us. Read the stories aloud in company
(29:36):
by candlelight, play the games, make the rights sing, the songs,
revel together with the animals and the villagers snuggle in
the egg of the dark. You published and never wanted
you to do an audiobook of this book on tape.
It would be fun, wouldn't it. I was looking for
(30:00):
when I came across your book, I was like, this
gotta it's gotta be. But that's a great idea. If
you were going to read a story, I have to
that that I would that I would ask you to
just choose which one you'd like to do. I don't know,
if I don't know, if there's all be surprises to
you or not. But the two that that I would
be happy with with either one of are The Sun
(30:21):
Coow and the Thief or the Pull Together Morning. Well,
you know, I would love to read The Sun Cow
and the Thief because it's sort of told in almost
like an intantery way, like almost like a chant. Is
there anything context wise about that story that we need
(30:42):
to set up, like any terms or anything. Obviously, the
Cow has a particular significance in India. It is even
though it is a tribal story and so thus it's
not part of Hinduism, it does borrow from the Hindu
neighbors in that the Hindu tell the story of Surya,
the on god born from the heavenly cow a d t.
(31:04):
And so there is this cultural overlap and borrowing they're
implied in the story. The Orisa have the largest variety
of tribal communities on the ethnographic map of India. The
Kutia cond arc farmers who specialize in the soulful craft
(31:25):
of wood carving. Like other Oresa. They have at the
core of their communal strength the village council and the dormitory.
The dormitory is the largest hut three sided, open in front,
hung with musical instruments and decorated with symbols of the
animal spirits. When the workday is done, it is the
(31:49):
site for the gathering of everyone in the village for
the dance. It functions as a kind of school of
dance for youngsters growing into tribal traditions, and it is
the meeting place where the elders of the village council,
who make decisions affecting every social, economic, and religious part
of life. The Arisa borrow from their Hindu neighbors, and
(32:13):
their neighbors borrow from them. The Hindu tell the story
of Surya, the sun god, born from the heavenly cow Aditi.
The Hindi word for cow go also means ray of
dawn or ray of spiritual illumination. The sun cow and
(32:37):
the thief. Back at the beginning, the village was like
a hinged box with many sides. A lonely man stood
on the outside. Looking in through the cracks. He could
(32:59):
see rightly colored crisscross lines everywhere. People walked to and
fro along the lines, carving shapes and painting shimmering colors
as they went. The man saw an order so neat
and easy. It seemed he should have been able to
slide right in, the very blood in his body, singing.
(33:23):
But something was wrong with him, with the way things were,
he could not get in. It was as if the
village had no doors, only cracks. He could only look,
never touch. He would always be on the outside, looking in.
(33:46):
Round the edges of the box, the sun cow walked
round and round its perfect side. She walked, milking out
her light in the day, filling the village box with
color and warmth. At she chewed her cut her black sides,
giving quiet warmth but no light. The man stood between
(34:08):
sun cow in the village. The only warmth that the
man could touch was sun cow herself. Whenever those inside
the village looked out, they saw only their son cow,
that lovely black heat that night tour, that daymaker. They
(34:29):
smacked their lips with the cream of it. They did
not say, look at that nice man standing outside looking in.
How silly that he stands alone at the edge, when
we could simply make a place for him in our
village of carvings, of shapes and colors. Come, sir, you
are welcome. They didn't say that. They didn't even see him,
(34:54):
And so The man waited for the sun cow every day,
waited for her her to pass him by. He smelled
her musky flanks, saw her soft eyes, and touched her
velvet hot muzzle. By some mysterious pressure, her light honey
milk poured out from her utter. The man could feel
(35:16):
the pressure of his own sadness inside him all at once.
One day, the man decided to take the sun cow
for himself. When all the pretty village people could not
have her anymore, then finally everything might be fair. So
he waited for her, not even bothering to hide. The
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village people could not see him after all, and she
had walked sweetly near him, nonchalant, every day of his life.
The day he stole sun Cow, he simply tossed a
noose over her head and pulled her away away over
the edge of the world, away from the box, away
from all the can't get in. Away alone to the edge,
(36:03):
the lights and colors in the village plunged into darkness.
Without sun Cow's milk, there was only night. The people
could not see. Babies cried, unfound and unfed by their mothers.
No one knew when to wake up, when to work.
All the order lay like unswept wood scraps in a
(36:25):
dark room. The tidy lines were lumped and smudged, The
colors disappeared. Where had their sun Cow gone? What had
become of her? They waited in sorrow and fear. The
thief was having his own problems. At the beginning, he
luxuriated in the warmth of sun Cow's solidity, in her rhythmical,
(36:49):
grassy breath. But away from her circling walk around the
little box world, away from her habits, no light came
from her utter, And because she would not let him
milk her, it was night for him too. No one
else had her, But now he didn't have her either.
(37:12):
When the thief, in desperation, tried to set beneath her
a pail and squeeze her teeths, she kicked the pail
away with such certain force that he feared that she
would kick him too, should he persist. She was only
trying to save his life, of course, for just think
what would happen to a single person who tried to
(37:32):
milk the sun. The thief held his head in his
hands for ever so long he sat, hoping for her
light again, longing for a sign that he might milk her.
Finally he knew he could not keep her anymore. He
leaned against her for goodbye, for a final giving in
(37:56):
to going back to the endless looking in and never having.
Then he slipped the noose from its steak and from
over her head, and set the sun cow free. But
she did not return to her circling walk around the village. Instead,
she leapt up high, joyously high up over the moon.
(38:22):
Now she walks not just around one village, but in
a vast sky circle, around all the villages, around the
circle of the whole world, so that no one now
needs simply look in without being part, without being seen.
Everywhere there are doors, carved intersections, lines criss crossing that
(38:46):
can be walked in and about, shivering and shining with color.
Everywhere there is light. You know, it's so interesting. There's
a theft, obviously, the theft of the cow, and then
the thief surrenders the cow. Eventually he realizes that it's fruitless.
(39:11):
And then there's a grace of the cow not going
back into the pen, but going into the sky and
giving that sort of profound gift, like something that you
couldn't have even known to ask for. Yes, you picked
exactly the story that has all three in it, didn't you.
I just got lucky. I think we'll call that another
(39:32):
little bit of gracer serendipity. Yeah. This episode of Ephemeral
was written and assembled by Alex Williams, with producers Max
Williams and Trevor Young. The book we discussed today is
The Return of the Light, twelve tales from around the
(39:54):
world for the winter Solstice. Caroline has also authored the
collections Sun Story In the Light of the Moon and
The Storyteller's Goddess. Find them wherever books are sold and
learn more at Caroline mc vickar edwards dot com. Links
and more at our website Ephemeral dot Show. And however
(40:16):
you celebrate, I hope your Solstice is full of warmth,
light and grace
Ephemeral News
Host
Alex Williams
Show Links
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