The day after winter Solstice's longest night is 19 seconds longer than the day before. These fleeting moments of light and visual warmth are precious where we live, just below the arctic.

We make a meal of salmon on the Solstice, we gather round the Yule tree and we share gifts of love to lighten the heart. The salmon's life is a potent symbol of rebirth, and this meal honors the cyclic nature of the season. Salmon return in the last year of their lives to the rivers and streams where they were spawned, spending the last of their life energy in spawning the next generation.

Every summer, when the days are long and the nights are oh so short, we journey to the river where the salmon are, we harvest gratefully the lives they offer and bring them home to our freezer. Our dipnets wait under the snow for the next season, and the salmon feed our bodies and lift our spirits through the dark and the cold.

I love the dark half of the year. I love the changing colors, brief though their tenure is here in Fairbanks. I love the starry nights, the aurora overhead. I love the snow. The cold. The really really cold. The dark. I love the way the light lingers near the horizon and never ventures overheard. I love seeing the moon at night. I love the way that the dark half of the year invites us deeper. Requires us to seek out the warmth, the community, the intimacy of connection with our dearest ones. Sings to us of the depths of heart, offers a well of creativity into which to dive.

Today marks the cusp. The transition from light to dark. Today hovers at 12 hours of daylight, and this evening promises 12 hours of stars. Today marks our transition to the depths, as the pendulum of the year swings by.

This year, the cold and the dark brings with it a squirming squishy bundle of new life. My hibernation this winter will be sleepless but full of cuddles. A transition perhaps more profound than any I have conscious memory of. You may have to remind me of this in a couple of months when I am exhausted and on the verge of tears. But right now? Looking ahead? I truly look forward to sitting on the couch in front of the woodstove, raw and open and vulnerable to the tidal pull of new life and new love, shirtless with sore nipples as we figure out this breastfeeding thing, sitting on an herbal compress and letting my husband feed the fire and rustle up the meals. Nothing outside the triad of forming a family.

Equinox is a time of rooting down. Of pulling our energy from the branches and the world to nourish what is deepest and most necessary. What are your roots this season? How will you care for them?