Winter Solstice (Christmas): Dreaming a Season of Change

Waiting for the December snowstorms of my childhood has become with each passing year an increasingly common experience. The feel of late-fall weather extends its stay, lurking around us in an endless way with temperatures in the single digits above freezing. Some migratory birds are staying longer like the heron who last year remained in my local wetlands through much of the winter. An Inuit friend from Nunavut emails to say songbirds are still in their far north lands. More often than not, the beautiful white blanket of my memories has been replaced with the bronze-brown shades of decomposing leaves, tree trunks and mud. Here and there a keen eye can still glean the contrast of greens in mosses, some living leaves, and the evergreen white pines, cedars and blue spruce.

With the winter solstice, our beloved Earth cycles us once more around the Sun into a time that is the pinnacle of dark days, intensifying cold air and what was in years past the inevitable white-out of a blizzard. For many, the relentless grey days can feel bleak as thoughts become heavy with a SAD (seasonal affective disorder) depression that endlessly whispers words of discouragement. While the annual cycle of seasons continues, these days so much of it is marked by a mixed-up kind of uncertainty and grief that I can sense all around us. We are in a time when every dream of spring renewal seems impossibly far away, perhaps further away than what it felt during the solstices of the past. And yet dreaming is what this winter season asks of us if the seeds of some mysterious renewal are to be planted within the womb of our being.

The solstice is a time of year when my Catholic upbringing springs to the surface with dreams of falling snow and the Christmas holiday. And yet those dreams have also become tinged with a kind of grief I feel for participating in a ceremony of giving that is inextricably mixed-up with the devastating consumerism epitomized by Black Friday. Each year brings new consumer records across North America. In 2023, American online shoppers spent a record $9 billion over the Black Friday weekend. Some studies have indicated that as much as 80% of these purchases are discarded following just a few uses, a further indication of how this semi-conscious frenzy is fuelling economic growth based upon a throw-away ethic. More than that, these annual online sales are producing an estimated 429,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, all of which is intensifying our modern push of the Earth’s climate into an unpredictable future.

Do we have any capacity to pull ourselves out of this spiral? Is the modern belief in our own capacities a sign of where we continue to go wrong? In uncertain times like our climate of change, Cayuga elder Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs advises us “to open our minds to receive those messages that are so important for our relationships, for our continuance on Mother Earth. These messages can come to us through dreams.” But she adds, we must reflect and work with those sacred messages if they are to give us a glimmer of guidance. Offering a comparable sense of the transformative potential in dreams, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung describes them as “pure nature; they show us the unvarnished nature truth.” Dreams have mysterious dimensions that are not subject “to our control but obey their own laws. They are obviously autonomous.” From these perspectives, working with our dreams can foster a relation with messages that are beyond, even before, our rational ego thought and modern impulses.

The miracle of such a gift can be seen playing out in the life of Thomas Merton during the winter of 1958 when a dream came to him that symbolically intimated the main themes that marked the last decade of his life. While cloaking the exact details of the dream, he did write of a young Jewish girl named Proverb who came to him that night. There was a haunting intimacy to Proverb’s presence that Merton says “clings to me and will not let go.” Touching him to the core, he writes: “How grateful I am to you for loving in me something which I thought I had entirely lost, and someone who, I thought, I had long ago ceased to be.” The nature of what he lost begins to come into view a few sentences later: “In your marvelous, innocent, love you are utterly alone: yet you have given your love to me, why I cannot imagine… Dearest Proverb, I love your name, its mystery, its simplicity and its secret, which even you yourself seem not to appreciate.”

The mystery of the name Proverb spoke to an “utterly alone” grace that simultaneously opened out to Merton in the giving of a simple love. Here was the relational spirit of what he had lost, as became clearer a couple weeks later at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in downtown Louisville. It was in this urban reality that he had one of his pivotal spiritual experiences. In a moment, all the faces of the strangers around Merton were transformed. He writes: “If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time.” The last decade of his life was marked by Proverb’s dual movement: recovering the lost divinity at the solitary core of his being, all our beings; and then connecting that unique gift to all our relations. From that point on, Merton’s life deepened into a hermit calling that, in a seeming paradox, led him to confront racial injustices, foster interfaith dialogues on the mysterious source of religion, and affirm the interplay of spirit in the cycling seasons of this Earth.

Winter is a solitary silent time that is perfect for dreaming. But to honour the mysterious and generative potentiality contained in the depths of this icy season when all light recedes, we need to give our dreams space to work upon us. The possibility of a renewal that is beyond our modern control is what this solstice asks me to contemplate.

Image: Two Row World with Dream Journal drawing of strait.

 It was in 2023, just following the winter solstice, that I first tested positive for Covid-19, a pandemic that is entangled with our climate of change as modern pressures on the Earth manifest a host of unpredictable mutations. As fever and chills shook my body, I had a particularly poignant dream filled with symbolism that epitomizes what Carl Jung termed a “big” dream. Though clothed in the situations of our everyday lives, such dreams also carry “the symbolic weight of mythological themes,” archetypes, ancestral presences and spirit. We can see this in Merton’s dream of Proverb who clearly had mythic and ancestral dimensions that he came to see playing out a few weeks later in downtown Louisville. Such dreams are for Jung “big” because they bring into awareness the sacred depths of our living reality, while also challenging us to walk their insights into our lives.

There are all kinds of dreams. Many seem short and fragmented, while others are simply confusing. Some nights seem utterly dreamless to the waking self. But then every once in a while, we have what Jung described as a “big” mythic dream. That was the felt quality of my fevered dream on the edge of Christmas. Something about it startled me awake as the images continued to unfold in the written drawings of my journal.

Walking along the north shore of my birth waters, the St. Lawrence River, it was readily apparent in that dream-like way that this was no river. Rather, it was a strait that joined two big rough oceans of water. With the Mohawk community of Akwesasne on the opposite shore, I was trying to build a bridge over the strait that would mysteriously make the flow between these blocked-up and turbulent waters more fluid. Something about the scale of the task flooded me with feelings of inertia and overwhelming anxiety. That was until an obscure voice, though familiar to earlier dreams, spoke from the shadows: “This task could take hundreds, even a thousand, years to complete, but some had to start the bridge-building.” The counsel instilled a feeling of relief, like a reminder that there is more to our actions than what our modern focus on immediate here-and-now impacts can attend.

The climate of the dream was drawing upon the Two Row relational work I had been doing with Norma Jacobs for the past decade in our co-teaching and writing of Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s: Reflecting on our Journeys. As I came to learn, this wampum belt and early friendship treaty between the Haudenosaunee and my canadien ancestors is more than a political agreement. The Two Row about what it takes to foster good relations across cultures, individuals, and with Mother Earth. These teachings are represented by the two rows of purple quahog shells (i.e., the unique people) that sit upon the white flowing river of life. As Norma writes:

If we spend time with the Two Row, it can teach us the value of keeping our cultural ways of living separate and independent, while also recognizing that when we walk side-by-side in a spirit of respect for each other, it is possible to connect and learn. We can maintain a friendship so as to travel on these waters together.

That is the work of coming to ǫ da gaho dḛ:s, and my dream was partially expressing a contentment with that, despite the political, social and individual obstacles that impede the flow of Mother Earth’s lifeblood. At the same time, it was also pointing out that the dividing river was more like a rough strait connecting oceanic depths that would take generations to bridge. In a spirit similar to how Norma describes the mysterious communication carried in dreams, there was a message here about the many failing relations that have turbulent depths more like an expansive and seemingly unbridgeable ocean.

For decades I felt the wholeness of Jung’s thought on dreams could help me connect with the breadth of Indigenous worldviews like that of Norma Jacobs as I searched for comparable ways of thinking that could foster a generative dialogue. My intuition was affirmed as I read Sioux scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. write about “several Jungian concepts used to describe psychological states that seemed similar, if not identical, to the Sioux Indian beliefs and experiences”, including his sense of dreams. Bringing the Jungian view in relation to his cultural understanding, Deloria describes dreams as “a psychic alarm system” that when heeded can serve “as an ego-corrective; an attempt on the part of a conscious unconscious to redirect a wrongly oriented ego path.” Despite finding common cross-cultural ground, he also clarifies various modern tendencies that limit the relational potential of Jung’s thought, including his over-emphasis of an individualized psyche disconnected from community and earthly kin.

Some of these limiting beliefs were reverberating through the presences of my “big” dream of the Two Row strait, and yet here Deloria adds one other vital point of difference with Jung. Though some dreams can carry messages about who we are and what we are meant to do on this Earth walk, he clarifies that in his culture such dreams are “common enough that people do not regard them as extraordinary.” He proposes that “big” dreams in the modern context may be experienced as particularly intense because of the rationalizing constraints of our society. The fast pace of our lives makes it easy to forget and thus not attend our dreams, with the result being a build-up of unconscious pressures.

Such blockages can lead to a more prodigious breakthrough of energy that is represented in Jung’s word “big”, and this is part of what I was witnessing in the turbulent vast ocean waters of my dream. But for Deloria and Norma Jacobs, dreams can also have practical everyday “implications not only for the individual life, but for the community”, our ancestors, future generations and creation. The seeming unbridgeable nature of that strait was connected to my personal ways of being, our social divides and the ancestral depths of these issues. While I agree with Deloria that such dreams feel “big” because of modern rational expectations of reality, it is also true that dreams with such mythic and yet everyday proportions are unique in the array of our nightly dreaming and in the quality of guidance offered.

The week before my dream I had come to this same place upon a small isle reachable from the St. Lawrence’s north shore after visiting my Mamere at the St. Joseph Care Centre. As I left the facility, I was struck by a stained-glass window that depicted God at its centre as an old white man with blue-hued waters and air swirling all around. But at that moment something else was striking me as the symbolic baggage of my Catholic birth faded into the grey snowy skies outside the building. A white male authoritarian God who controls creation is one of those projections of the Christian mind that has had such devastating impacts, from the Doctrine of Discovery that doomed relations with Indigenous peoples to the treatment of Earth as both a re-source for our insatiable Black Friday desires and sink for our ever-growing plastic-lithium wastes. Here is how Merton describes such destructive religious projections:

If we attribute to much power to our “clear ideas” of God, we will end by making ourselves a god in our own image, out of those clear ideas. If we do not grant concepts any power to tell us the truth about God, we will cut off all possible contact between our minds and Him.

In other words, we need ways of remembering how our concepts are referring to mysteries far beyond their capacity to symbolize and objectify. Our ideas and stories must continually touch that mystery so as not to idolize ourselves, our ego reach for power, and our temporal desires to virtually consume every “thing” we can take hold of.  

Later in the day, out along the river that I have frequented since my father’s death in the same Care Centre over a decade ago, I could not stop seeing a more mysterious, less white male, Creator stirring behind and within our whole climate of change. There was a welcomed transparency to this naturalized stain-glass view that offered a different sense of the mixed-up Christmas season. We want to participate in the reciprocity of life by giving and receiving, and yet our over-indulgence freezes, objectifies, life in unsustainable ways. Even as I honour the winter solstice with prayer, carols and ceremony, there is a vast disconnect between my internal intentions and external ways of being. This is what the voice in my mythic dream was impressing upon me with the statement that this task could take a thousand years.

There is much more going on behind our modern ways of living that makes recognizing the vast depth of what is before us difficult, and the act of bridge-building seem almost an impossibility. And while these ways are not unique to Black Friday, Christmas and Boxing Day, this season does starkly epitomize the growing night inherent in our present moment. My dream was a reminder that in the seasonal cycles of our social era we are far from spring’s re-birth and, more to the point, like the changing of seasons we do not control that cycle. All we control is how we move with the changes as we dream of new paths for living with the great mystery of this earthly life.

If we return to the insights of Jacobs, Deloria and Jung, the challenge is to foster space for our mythic dreams so they can re-align our daily ways of living. This is just what Proverb did for Merton as he walked the streets of Louisville back to his monastery and then into a hermit calling that also led him to engage various social challenges rooted in the realities of the 1960s. His acts of space-making can be seen in how he attended the felt dimensions of his dream, journaled about Proverb as he did with the stories of his faith, engaged Proverb as a spiritual presence who had something to teach him, and through his contemplative practices allowed this presence to work on him through the worldly relations of downtown Louisville, the Gethsemani monastery and far beyond. These tendrils of transformation can also be witnessed in the way he tells the original Christmas story.

Image: Picture of manger within the root system of big fallen pine that was blown down during an extreme wind storm.

 “Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited.” It is with these poignant words written a few years after his dream that Merton offers a way to connect his sense of Proverb’s hiddenness with the central birth story of his Catholic tradition. He continues:

But because He [Christ] cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world… to taste a little human joy… to come home to family… desires for which there is no room. It is in these that He hides himself, for whom there is no room.

Just as the light recedes to its greatest extent at the winter solstice, any room for birthing the spirit that Merton’s tradition names as Christ has receded to the edge of our communities; from two millennial ago in the Middle East to the first seventeenth century Catholic missions on these lands to our modern era. These words partake in the emancipatory spirit of what Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez called in 1971, a few years after Merton’s death, liberation theology. While this movement arose in response to the extreme poverty, colonial legacies and power imbalances of Latin America, Merton was also responding to the racial injustices experienced by Black and Indigenous peoples within the United States. Reflecting on the culpability of his faith and society, he goes on to write:

Have we yet become Christians? The duty of the Christian [is] to see Christ being born into the whole world and to bring Him to life in all mankind. But we have sought to birth in the world the image of ourselves and of our own society and we have killed the Innocents in doing so… Have we ever become Christians?

What draws me to Merton is his capacity to witness the darkest nights of his Catholic tradition as inextricably knotted with who he is, with his responsibilities. “Have we ever become Christians?”, this question is not directed outside himself. Rather, it is directed to his spiritual core as part of a living faith community that is leaving “no room” for spirit to be born here. Such an act of communal recognition is partly what the love of Proverb showed Merton in his dreaming of what was almost “entirely lost.” And in that way of loving his mixed-up roots, some room is held open in the midst of this winter season. Looking back on myself in light of his approach, I can see how often I lacked such courage to love the contradictory tensions of who I am.

Almost three decades ago now, my first Christmas Eve as a social worker in a northern Indigenous community was spent in -20º Celsius weather helping others coax a group of gas-sniffing children out from under an abandoned house. I can still smell the pungent petrol commingling with the sight of young kids huffing out of plastic bags in an attempt to deal with so much loss related to a culture torn apart by Catholic and Canadian missions. The historic depth of my position in this reality was highlighted by the fact that I, the social worker, was living in the Roman Catholic Mission, a mission house within which the priest had been replaced by the secular ways of a social worker. It was here that I first clearly saw what happens when people are denied space to be who they are, when there is “no room” for the spirit of their culture and land to inspire how they live.

It was here that I also really felt what it means to be embedded in such a disempowering power structure. Not being as mature or spiritually practiced as Merton, I began disconnecting and denying my Catholic roots. Years before the term became part of popular culture, I was “cancelling” an original part of myself that ensured there would be little to “no room” for truthful reconciliation. This is a significant dimension of how I was impeding the flow in my dream and life.

Despite these limitations, for the three decades since that northern Christmas season I have been working toward the spirit of that bridge-building dream. A vital part of this has been finding ways to change how I live on stolen lands through connecting with the teachings of early treaties like the Two Row and the 1701 Montreal Tree of Peace that is central to my French canadien ancestors and Indigenous relations. Those negotiations brought into peaceful alignment 40 nations that included Nouvelle France. To affirm support of the central vision that informed this Tree of Peace, the French Governor Louis-Hector de Callière stated: “I today ratify the peace we have made. I attach my words to the wampum belts I give to each of your nations so that the elders may have them carried out by their young people.”

The deliberations in Montreal were suffused in wampum belt teachings like that of the Haudenosaunee Gayensra’go:wa (Great Law or Tree of Peace) and the Sewatokwa’tshera’t (Dish-with-one-Spoon) whose white background centred with a round of purple represents all the lands that would be shared. As with the Two Row, the Montreal Tree of Peace does not signify a transfer of land ownership as is assumed in the colonial and modern mind. Rather, they clarify our responsibilities to foster peace across human, ecological and even spiritual communities. To violate this agreement is to undermine the relational spirit of this Earth that is the source and sustenance of all our lives. This is what the colonial missions meant to unravel through subjugating Indigenous peoples and their wisdom for relating with this Earth.

There was “no room” for such a way of being, for spiritual agreements that clarify the land can never be owned, bordered by nations or, for that matter, stolen. The etymology of the word “own” derives from the 12th century Old English word “owe” whose original meaning is to “have as a duty or obligation.” In this deeper historic sense, to own is not about taking possession of noun-like objects, property or consumer items, but is more a verb-like activity connected to responsibilities we have to what we hold in common (e.g., land, climate) across particular relations. There is much more room in this sensibility for connecting with the spirit of the Two Row, Montreal Tree of Peace and, as I talk about in my Easter blog, a Thanksgiving Address whose Indigenous spirit I approach through the etymology of merci/mercy. “The old Etruscan merc is about relational exchange, the reciprocity of giving, receiving and giving again.”

There has been little space for this spirit of responsibility to come into this world where we continue to objectify so much, and as such the miraculous birth continues to occur within a “demented inn” on the edge where much is discarded and forgotten. But on a deeper level that goes beyond particular identities, the incarnating Christ spirit is in Merton’s teachings a pathway for rooting our ways of living in relational values that need more room to breathe. Some of those values that I can senses in his dream of Proverb and writing include the spark that comes from sharing a little joy, belonging, compassion, love, merci/mercy and peace.

All these values are central to the Christmas season, and yet they often take a backseat to our Black Friday frenzy. They are also the flowing inspiration of this land’s original treaties, and yet here too there has been “no room” for them to guide our ways of living. Bringing all this back to the message of the mysterious voice in my solstice dream, all I can do is work in a more grounded way from my canadien catholic shore with a sense of faith in the importance of simply being aligned with these life-giving values rather than expecting some kind of visible and immediate success. This winter season asks us to release control so we can patiently slow into some other generative possibility that is inherently mysterious.

Dreaming with a Season of Change: Key Points

• By simply attending our dreams, we can over time learn to discern the different depths they offer, from the everyday to the big mythic vistas that occasionally come like a gift;

• Dreams of mythic everyday scale often arise in particularly charged moments of our life, such as during a ceremony and its preparation, times of sickness, or while traveling in a searching way.

• Clearing space for the energy of our dreams is a way of nurturing their ongoing presence in our lives. There are many different ways of giving them space: journaling, contemplating, drawing, active imagining, caroling/singing, and others…

• Approach the symbols, images and presences of those dreams in the multi-dimensional fullness that they contain. This includes intense feelings, sensuality like colour, honouring mystery or spirit, everyday groundings, and deep thinking which I put last as a reminder of our predisposition to rational explanations that often kill the messaging in those other dimensions.

• Vital dreams do not end with the dreaming, for the energy carried within them should not be objectified as something known and controlled. Rather, such dreaming is part of an ever-moving process that can come to inhabit the way we walk in this life. The space we clear is meant to get us out of the way so these autonomous depths can work our lives.

• Finally, winter is a season that resonates with such acts of mythic dreaming and we can foster those connections through how we approach the solstice and, for those who are Christian, the Christmas season.

A dream that feels mythic in an everyday way is like a seed being planted in the wintry depths of our being. In a sense, our life is being given the challenge to birth something that is so much more than what we currently are or can imagine ourselves to be. To love these lands without fostering the consumptive desire to steal them, to own them, to define them with the borders of our national fictions and cultural projections. This is partly what the turbulence of our climate of change is asking us to release, to create space for seeding a new understanding and way. We each need to find cultural stories that can help us kindle the energy needed to navigate that task regardless of how vast, in space and time, it may seem. That is what Merton’s approach of Proverb and the Christmas story offers my solstice dreaming.

In many ways, winter is a season when there is “no room” for so much of what gives life. The Sun’s light is in full recession, many of the birds have migrated south, the waters are steadily contracting into their icy form, and for us humans we have long felt inclined to huddle around a warming fire that today has been transformed into the blue glow of our ever-present screens. Social contact and relationality are of a very different pace and tone for the few months that follow the solstice, and in this there are vital lessons for the winter season our global modern society has entered with this climate of change.

From Black Friday into the Boxing Day sales that follow Christmas, the nights of this winter season seem to be primarily defined by acts that fuel unequal wealth accumulation through our consumption of so much life. These impacts can be seen in the unstable weather that not only replaces winter’s white blanket with the muddy paths I walk upon, but in other regions has more devastating manifestations like the ever-intensifying fires that one year consume Australia; the next a California mountain; and then the forests of Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec. Elsewhere these changes take the form of record floods, glacial melting, intensifying hurricanes, and the relentless departure of plants and animals in what some characterize as the Earth’s sixth major extinction event. Our modern ways are leaving “no room” for our Earth relations to be, to live.

In the stories and dreams told by Merton, the beginning and end mirror each other. There is no room in Bethlehem for the birth of Christ accept on the edges of human homes, surrounded by animals, a few shepherds, some elder magi, the star-filled night sky and Mother Earth. Three decades after his birth there remained no room for someone whose relational values more often than not came into conflict with institutional power, whether that be of the religious temple or political court. That is the message carried on the cross in the wasteland of Golgotha at the edge of Jerusalem. There remains “no room” for spirit in our modern world, perhaps there is even less than at any other time in history. And yet while there is no seeming room, there is in this story a model for birthing spirit on the edge of social acceptability.

We need to clear space and time for a dream seed that can be nurtured when spring eventually arrives, and way to do this is by following Merton’s example of holding our contradictory tensions in our being. I love the spaciousness and relational spirit of the Christmas season, and yet so much of it makes me feel nauseous. I love these forested winter lands, and yet can I love that which is stolen. I want to belong to my canadien catholic traditions and yet I also do not. “We have to start”, Merton says, “from our alienated condition. We are prodigals in a distant country, the “region of unlikeness,” and we must seem to travel far in that region before we reach our own land (and yet secretly we are in our own land all the time!).”

Perhaps what I need to do now, more than anything else, is slowdown and rest my ever-dominant desire to know, control, consume and own. Winter is a season when I can patiently give space for a dream seed to work upon me, to nurture in me the hope of finding a new-old way of belonging to this Earth. 

Select Source of Referenced Guides:

Deloria, Jr., Vine (2016). C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature, and the Primitive, New Orleans: Spring Journal Books.

Jacobs, Norma and Leduc, Timothy (In Press). Two Row Education: Dreaming our Earth Medicines.

Merton, Thomas (1961). The New Man. New York: Farrar, Stauss & Giroux.

Merton, Thomas (1966). Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions.

Pramuk, Christopher (2015). At Play in Creation: Merton’s Awakening to the Feminine Divine. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.