Winter Solstice is a time of darkness.
We take time to consider the virtue of darkness: the strength and honesty to face what is dark, and hard, and true. The virtue of darkness is the willingness to stare into challenges so immense they seem unsolvable, and not look away.
Solstice also meditates on the virtue of fire. The virtue of fire is ambition, and problem solving, and a potent desire to do something to fight back against the dark and the cold. It is gathering together to tell stories of the beautiful futures we see flickering in the flames; it is electricity and rockets and the dream of a different existence..
Both of these metaphors, these virtues, are worthy ones, and I’m glad our community takes the time to honor and reinforce them. But I want to consider another virtue now: the virtue of ash.
To do that, I want to tell you a story.
A hundred years ago this winter, the first World War came to a close. Armistice was signed on November 11, and soldiers began to come home. For those who had lived through the war, the winter of 1918 must have been a time of mingled joy and horror. Joy, because the grinding engine of death had finally slowed to a stop. Horror, because in so short a time, so much had fallen apart. In France, nearly one in twenty people died during the war. A third of the soldiers under 25 never made back it to their families, in that winter of 1918.
Holidays are when we pull out songs and ornaments and tradition, and they have a way of bridging you more closely to past winters. I can’t imagine pulling out a photo from just five years ago, and reflecting on all the stories that had brutally ended in the time since it was taken. On all the ties of love and friendship turned to frayed ends, painful with the ache of old laughter. On all the certainties of a boring, middle class life now collapsed into unpredictability and madness. A famous quote, from 1914, goes “the lamps are going out, all over Europe, and they won’t be lit again in our lifetime”. I can’t imagine remembering a once-glowing place, now turned to ash and tears.
I used to believe that I was born at the end of history. Not in some direct way, not in those words, not consciously, but the world felt like it was angled upward. It felt like chaos and conflict were relics of history books. I didn’t grow up learning to hide under desks from the bomb. The world didn’t feel caught up anymore in the grand narratives of hatred and bloodshed that had dominated the past. Reasonableness and progress were the order of the day. and I thought my life would be woven into this story of boring, banal forward motion, that I had escaped the reach of that big, all-consuming fear that your world may fall apart at any moment.
Recently, that certainty has been shaken. I’ve watched the reasonableness of our leaders devolve into viciousness, watched suspicion and fear and short-termism diffuse into our international system, watched the institutions built to ward off the next war grow slowly less sturdy. I’ve watched old patterns start to repeat themselves. I understand I may be over-reacting, but that doesn’t make the fear less real to me. The fear that maybe our 75 years of peace, and cooperation, and economic progress were the exception rather than the rule. That, ultimately, humanity isn’t capable of overcoming our most self-destructive tendencies. Even considering the possibility is paralyzing, because the story I grew up with - the story that we were past all that, and on to better things - has no room for a war like that to be anything other than a repudiation of all the progress we thought we’d won.
The stories we all tell ourselves at Solstice are often ones of figurative battle. We face dangers and challenges, we say, but if we can prove ourselves equal to them, a better future lies ahead. Exploration among the stars; mastery of our basic needs; a humanity freed from illness and even death. In these stories, there is either success or failure, because the stakes we imagine are so high. It’s not worth imagining What Happens After, because we’ve told ourselves the only catastrophes worth caring about are the ones without an After.
But I don’t think that’s nuanced enough. Because, yes, it can be true that the consequences of failure are so enormous that just resigning ourselves to living through them is unconscionable. And yet. The scope of humanity’s possible futures isn’t constrained to either total collapse or continuation along this endless upward curve.
Our community has stories to lead us towards utopia, and stories to warn against apocalypse, but I don’t think it has enough stories of how to mourn failure and loss, because we have a hard time imagining failures that are less than total.
We need to be more imaginative.
We need to imagine the wake of a war, when ports and libraries and the ambitious projects of good people lie in rubble. We need to imagine an epidemic on a grand scale, that breaks our medical systems to decimate communities and countries. We need to imagine these things, not to glut ourselves on horror, but to practice the resolve of realizing that something beautiful has been lost, that our dreams are now farther and harder than once they were, and still setting our gaze to the path forward.
It’s the virtue of looking at the burnt ruins of a house you spent years building, of feeling sick with the weight of what was lost, and beginning to rebuild, because what else is there to do but rebuild. Because where else is there to go, but back up the mountain, pushing yourself and your dreams higher once again.
That is the virtue of ash.
It’s easy, intellectually, to say that so long as humans are left, we haven’t truly lost. But it won’t feel that way in the moment, I think. It will feel like a loss beyond words. Humanity has been there before, in the dark ages reflecting on the lost glory of Rome, after the devastation of the black plague, amid the corpses of the 20th century wars. At each of those moments, even when the loss felt all-consuming, our ancestors had an obligation to make the better future we now inhabit, and if we experienced the lik , we too would be obligated to face what is already so and fix our eyes on the path to tomorrow. But I don’t know if stories of fire and stories of darkness would be enough nourishment at a time like that.
Because, even on small silly human scales, I know from experience that it can tear you apart to see old happiness fade, to see expectations collapse, and to have to start again. And if our only alternative narrative to the permanent upward push of progress is the conviction that we had our shot… and lost it, we abandon too many paths of the future to darkness and despair.
This may sound too much like resignation to some of you; you may believe that imagining the aftermath of catastrophe as anything other than unthinkable, infinite darkness, is a too-dangerous concession. But I don’t think resolve needs to bring resignation with it. I think you can fight as hard as you can to prevent something, but still acknowledge that if there are humans left in the rubble, those humans will need stories that tell them all is not lost, even though much has been.
Survival is one thing, but survival of optimism is another. If my world came apart at the seams, I don’t know what story I’d tell myself to make the possibilities of the future feel more salient than the reality of what was lost . Rather than seeing today as the starting point for tomorrow, I fear I’d be be paralyzed by the ache of effort squandered and hopes extinguished. I fear I’d be mesmerized by the glittering lights of that house as it was in my memory as I stare at its ashes on the ground. I fear that the shadows of what Was would haunt my ability to think of What Can Be.
I wish us all nothing but light. I hope that the fires we build blaze far into the future, and illuminate the pathways to prosperity of and beyond our dreams. I hope that the losses you and we face are mild and surmountable.
But if all of those hopes fail, I wish you the virtue of ash, to help turn your eyes upward and begin anew.
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