Winter Solstice Wedding Ceremony, 2013 - This is a section of text that I will be reading at my dear niece's Soltice Wedding Ceremony

We gather here on this wondrous dark winter's evening to celebrate this marraige at the time of the winter solstice.  A time that for millennia has been a winter's celebration of nature's cycle of renewal.

A time when our days of lengthening darkness become days of lengthening light.  The winter solstice is not a certain moment in time but an immeasurable shifting and turning.  Even now as we are gathered together in this room in the deepest dark of winter, our earth is tilting just a bit more on it's axis as it orbits the sun.  We are moving through overlapping shadows, light and dark, to a new phase.

We hold steady in the knowing that we rest in an imperceptible vast motion that carries us surely and steadily forward.  We live in the hope that we will be brought safely and surely through the dormancy of winter into the quickening of life in spring.  We celebrate in the hope of the coming of the light.

That love can be a renewing process can at times seem like the greatest mystery of all.  The solstice reveals some aspects of that mystery to us.  Love's process of renewal is not a return of the same or a repetition of the same, but a transformative renewal, a freshening, a rebirth.

We often feel its quickening in the darkest moments. It emerges and comes to light when greeted honestly with serious compassion and care in words and actions, with tenderness in fragile moments.  Renewal of love carries forward at times in joyous ease, and at other times, in painful truths and tears.  We hold it in awe.  We rest in its rhythm. We gain strength as we offer ourselves to its call again and again.  We live in longing for its vibrant illumination

-Julia Livingston, December, 2013