Hey everyone, welcome to Secular Solstice 2020
It… has been one pretty intense year. And this is going to be a pretty weird solstice.
And… on one hand man, it sucks a lot that we can’t all be here together, in person, for real. But, part of me is kinda excited that in some ways, we’re more altogether here than ever before. I know there are people tuning in from Berkeley, New York City, Boston, New Hampshire, Undisclosed Locations in the Woods.
We’ve put a… kinda ridiculous amount of effort into building custom online tools to bring us as close together as we can manage. I’m excited to be here with all of you.
Now some of you might be thinking “I’ve been to 10 Solstice celebrations and this one’s all weird and different and it’s in a little rectangle and I’m confused. What’s going to happen exactly here.” And others might be thinking “man, I’ve never been to a Solstice in my life and this year it was just so convenient I finally showed up, but also, um, yeah what exactly is going to happen here?”
Which are both quite reasonable questions, which we’ll answer in just a second. But first, a little story about the reason for the season.
The Winter Solstice is the longest night of the year. It’s the beginning of the return of the light. In a way it’s a kind of default holiday for humanity. For ancient peoples, whether you were dealing with literal ice and snow, or just a colder rainy season, it was important to know when the year would end. And along the way, people had stories talking about this. They shared stories of gods getting angry, or about gods getting reborn. But no matter who you were, and what stories you had, there was a question you were faced with – when would winter come. And it mattered that you go beyond the stories, that you go out into the world and look. There was a right answer about when the darkness would come and when the light would return. And knowing the right answer might determine whether your community survived. Now, it’s not the literal astronomical solstice today, we’re two days early. But we’re gathered here tonight to face the coming darkness together. We’re here to celebrate the story of humanity, and how our people brought light to the world.
As we do that, we’ll be undertaking a few different journeys together.
We’ll be journeying from light, to darkness, into light again.
We’ll be journeying from past, to present, to future. And hopefully, we’ll be journeying from “a little bit uncomfortable singing out loud in our living rooms” to “totally comfortable with that.” If you’re new, you might not know most of the songs, but that’s okay. If you don’t think you’re good at singing, that’s fine. Solstice is about singing together, and even if you’ve never heard a song before we’d love to hear you trying out singing along with it, and us, as best you can.
We have admins on the backend who will be fiddling with our audio-settings in realtime to make sure we sound pretty nice together and fix any crazy background noise that might suddenly come up. So no matter where you are and whether you think of yourself as a singer, tonight, please feel totally free to sing your heart out.
Now, what concretely is going to happen tonight?
First: This’ll be about two hours long. It’ll involve a lot of singing, and a lot of listening to stories.
On the right side of the screen is a chat widget. For the first 30 minutes, that widget will be up, you can chat with each other about what’s going on and catch up and just generally be virtual humans together. But after 30 minutes, after we’ve settled in, that chat will turn off. We’ll begin our descent into darkness, and try to get into a ritual headspace.
As we descend into darkness, things may get uncomfortable. This holiday is about facing difficult truths together, but it’s important to protect yourself. If you’re not in a good headspace to reflect on how awful reality can get, that’s okay. You can take a break and come back. You can tap out, and come to the afterparty afterwards. We’ll also have a corner at the afterparty for people who to help each other process things.
Now: There’ll be people giving speeches. We care a lot about not-saying-false-things at Solstice. We’ve put a lot of effort into not-saying-false things. Nonetheless, the universe is a messy, complicated place. We might not all believe the exact same things about how the world is, or how to relate to it. If someone says something you don’t agree with, that’s okay. Solstice is about collectively seeking truth together. But it’s okay if we’re not all at the same page at the same time.
Finally, on a logistical note – if you’ve got some candles, now is a good time to light them. Over the course of the night, we’re going to slowly turn off the lights. Maybe take note of where the lightswitch is so you can do that more easily when the time comes.
And now, let’s get ready to sing, and journey through the past together.
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