Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
I think of those animals who will never, in their entire lives, see or feel the sun; born inside prison cells and sentenced to a lifetime of captivity inside the crates of filthy sheds or the cages of sterile, artificially-lit laboratories, with not a spark of sunlight to ever be felt on the skin or inside the mind or heart.
Image by
S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay
It was last year’s December that allowed me to at least begin to
understand the significance of the winter solstice, as it might have been
experienced by those who once celebrated it en masse: gathering together in
the spirit of festivity and solidarity, sharing banquets of harvest-season
abundance, surrounded by fires symbolizing the return of the light.
For most of my life, I have spent Decembers in the southern hemisphere,
where the holiday season is celebrated during the summertime, and a white
Christmas is more the stuff of greeting cards and carols than it is of the
surrounding atmosphere. For that reason, it was the summer solstice that led
to my first recognition of the connection between the celebration traditions
I had been raised with and the ancient rites of the seasonal festivities
from which they originate. When I first heard the word solstice as a young
adult, it made immediate sense that the pastoral people whose lives were
governed by these day-to-day and month-to-month changes in the angle of the
light would observe such turning points not only as shifts in the cycles of
the natural world, but as shifts in the cycles of the great Powers that Be.
In 2018, I spent December in the Northern Hemisphere, and in the light of a
sunset walk one early evening, I found myself struck by how much more
significant the observance must have been for those experiencing seasons in
far northern climates, for whom the ancient midwinter must have been a time
to test one’s faith, indeed.
I found myself looking ahead to the approaching solstice in the midst of
what had perhaps been the darkest time in my life, as my dear friend, a
woman who had been a role model and mentor to me over the past 20 years, was
suffering through the torment of what turned out to be a terminal cancer
diagnosis. Everyone around me was struggling to somehow find our way to any
degree of understanding about what was really happening: both to our friend
who had suddenly, without warning, been forced to come face to face with her
darkest fears; and to those who loved her, those who had been touched by the
light she had shone during her extraordinary life, those who were now
haunted by the possibility of that light being extinguished. Underneath our
shared silence, we were starting to fear that perhaps nothing we could do
would be enough, but with no way of knowing that Gentle World’s matriarch
would be gone from our lives before the arrival of the spring. As her light
began to lessen before our eyes, it started to seem as though we had somehow
lost our way along a path that had always promised an ever-brighter future
up ahead. Our sun was fading.
I began to reflect on what it might have meant in times gone by to be able
to rely on the annual advent of a seasonal celebration so universal that
everyone in the tribe could be helped by it: the elderly perhaps even more
so than the young, and even the sick and those who were dying. I wondered if
perhaps even the recently bereaved might have found in the solstice festival
an opportunity to be comforted, however temporarily, by the communal spirit
of celebration acknowledging something so unquestionably hopeful: the return
of the sun’s light as it ends its period of waning and begins, at long last,
to slowly regain strength.
This December, I face the winter solstice with perhaps a little more
appreciation for what it might mean for others who are struggling to
remember that although we have a winter ahead of us, the light will, as it
always does, return.
I think of my fellow activists in colder climates; those who demonstrate,
those who educate, and those who rescue; those who strive to make their very
lives a reason for hope for nonhumankind, but who find their own hope being
tested more than at any other time of year due to the shorter hours of
light, longer hours of dark, and the bitter chill that bites at the soul at
the same time as fingertips and faces.
I think of my comrades who run the sanctuaries around the world that are
rapidly becoming an international network of safe spaces for nonhuman
refugees; these are service-driven people who have turned their backs on
worldly aims in order to do nothing more but offer shelter to those who have
somehow escaped the knife. Each of those they harbor is the living miracle
of an individual once condemned yet still alive to tell the tale through a
body and brain that will bear the scars for the rest of their days. The
salvaged souls who find asylum in these havens still inhabit sentient bodies
vulnerable to the elements and are now in need of being provided with the
warmth and care they were once denied, in order to simply survive the winter
months and see the tender light of another spring.
I think of those still confined in the facilities of industry: those who are
not so fortunate as to have been rescued, but who remain on the other side
of the fences and bars constructed by our prejudice against them; those who
also yearn for the return of the sun, as they shiver and freeze in winter
conditions that many will not be able to withstand; those who have survived
the Thanksgiving massacre that took their cousins and friends, and those who
will escape becoming a part of the Christmas ‘cull’ to suffer through months
of life-threatening cold, only to face the horror of slaughter in the warmer
months; those who do not know whether they will survive to once again feel
the hope offered by the turn of the season, or whether the dimming of this
year’s sun is the herald to the extinguishing of their own.
I think of every nonhuman mother whose body is heavy with the weight of the
new life she will bring forth next year, but who already knows from the
events of years past that this strengthening sun will bring her not joy but
yet another experience of despair, as yet another newborn babe is wrenched
away to disappear from her sight and her life forever. Never again to be
nuzzled, never again to be nursed. Born into the soft light and colors of
spring, his mother will never know whether he will even see his first
solstice in June.
I think of those who find themselves tasked with the degrading and
devastating burden of carrying out these acts, and the darkness that must
follow them into the rest of their lives. I think of those who continue to
ask them to do it, perhaps unaware of, or perhaps unwilling to allow in the
reality of the excruciating pains such expectations inflict on the
perpetrators as well as the victims.
I think of all who suffer within the painful confines of this system of
discrimination that sees oppression as so natural and so intrinsic that it
turns us into oppressors ourselves; people from all walks of life who would
never want to be a part of causing suffering to others, but who have been
born, as we all have, into a society that begins in our infancy to shape
beliefs that cripple us by dimming the light within, disabling our faculties
of compassion, empathy and reason: the very qualities that are, in fact, our
birthright; qualities that lie at the heart of our humanity.
I think of those who will never, in their entire lives, see or feel the sun;
born inside prison cells and sentenced to a lifetime of captivity inside the
crates of filthy sheds or the cages of sterile, artificially-lit
laboratories, with not a spark of sunlight to ever be felt on the skin or
inside the mind or heart. For unfathomable numbers of animals like us the
world over, their experience of the sun is only that of nightfall and
daybreak inside prison walls: the arrival of the dark signalling the time
for the nightmares of whatever shreds of sleep they can hold onto, followed
by just enough light to illumine the nightmares of being awake another day
in the depths of humanity’s darkness.
I wonder if these light-starved captives even know that there is such a
thing as the golden orb in the sky. As fellow earthlings with elements of
history and heritage common to all who have evolved on a planet illuminated
and warmed by its glow, is it possible that they hold in their hearts a
belief in its brilliance, even in the absence of feeling it shining on their
skin, brightening their thoughts and comforting their very souls? Do they
know that darkness is not, in fact, all there is?
Winter, as one of my other very dear friends once said, is a dark time:
“It is a time of faith that there will be light
Your faith in the light is not an impossible dream of the blind
Your faith is firmly supported by your knowledge
And that knowledge rests, comfortably, upon reason and upon truth
Your faith in the Light you have learned from Spring
who, on every ledge of your knowing, waits in front of winter
Reason tells you it shall be so again.”
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