This is not my Winter Solstice post

Shakti (Photo credit: rouwkema)

This is not my post. My post, which I spent hours outlining and researching, was about inviting the divine feminine into the celebration of the Winter Solstice. This is not the post I intended to write.

This is not my post because today a man with a gun took the lives of twenty children and six adults in an elementary school and I can't read my outline through the tears that keep flowing. This is not a personal tragedy - I do not know anyone in Newtown, Connecticut - but a universal tragedy that stabs at my heart as I'm sure it stabs at the hearts of all parents.

Over the past few weeks, this mother's heart has been shaken, beaten and trampled by sadness, fear and, with its own way of pounding my insides, joy. But that is what a mother's heart is for. Every change, welcomed or not, is like a birth, complete with expansion, discomfort, movement and, sometimes, seemly unbearable pain. Then there is a new creation, but it's naked and bloody and screaming and demanding. And it will be loved and nurtured with every cell of a battered and bruised heart.

Changes as simple as the reassignment of household chores were uncomfortable. The switch to homeschooling brought fear with the adjustments. Finding out my daughter needs to explore life instead of reading about it in college textbooks is pulling my heart in so many different directions I expect it to tear into pieces. There have been losses in my circle of friends and within our community. Not long ago I watched helplessly as my childhood home was devastated by a hurricane. And then, just as we slip into the final week before the foretold longest night to beat all longest nights, there is the grief of universal tragedy. But that's what a mother's heart is for.

Tonight I lit a candle to mourn the loss of children, but my tears are for their mothers who, when the pain subsides, will have given birth to an emptiness that will need care and compassion forever. And my tears are for a world that is clinging to hatred, violence and chaos and collectively digging in its heels to slow the slide into the terrible pain of rebirth, afraid of what the new creation, ultimate freedom and love, may demand of it. But each and every one of us is the embodiment of Shakti, the female power that creates the very change we are fighting to stop. We all have a mother's heart. We have the strength to bear the pains of sadness and fear and joy, and together we can create a new world. All we have to do is let go of everything except each others' hands.

Perhaps the divine feminine is here for the Winter Solstice, invited or not. Maybe this is my post.