On Capricorn Season, The Winter Solstice & Renewing Our Light
Here we go again.
On Saturday, December 21st, the Sun moves into Capricorn, welcoming us into Capricorn Season and marking the Winter Solstice for us folks in the Northern hemisphere.
Over the course of a year, the sun waxes and wanes like the moon—shaping a journey of increasing and decreasing light that is the solar cycle. The Winter Solstice is the darkest day of the year, and a turning point in the cycle that we might view as both the end and the beginning. I’ve always loved this annual cosmic reminder of the old axiom that it’s always darkest before the dawn. From here until the Summer Solstice next June, the sun shines for a little longer each day. And perhaps likewise, our creative selves will slowly unfold until they reach a new pinnacle of potential and light.
I’m drawn to the essential darkness of the Winter Solstice not just for its promise of growing creative potential, but also for the opportunity to go inward, which I’m learning is a key quality to Capricorn as well. Though Capricorn is a cardinal, earth sign associated with authority, ambition, and a knack for progress, it is also a yin sign, giving it a quality that is essentially receptive in nature. There is something about Capricorn, even with its reputation for worldly success, that is calling us towards hibernation and inner reflection.
The more I study astrology, the more I become convinced that linear time is an illusion. Life is inherently cyclical, just like the sun’s journey through the Zodiac. But as astrologer Erin Sullivan explores in her book on Retrograde Planets, our culture has learned to resist the cyclical nature of time. She states:
We have, over aeons, out of our conscious and unconscious need to eliminate chaos, organized our lives to a minute degree. The prison of culture, the oppression of civilization, has essentially desacralized the world, and we now experience a drastic separation of nature from culture. This is an age-old dichotomy, but in modern culture we experience not just disenchantment but extreme alienation. Astrology hopes consciously to reconnect nature and culture by including a cosmic paradigm for earthly activity. Recognizing astrological timing, and incorporating it into our cultural ethos, allows the individual to re-engage his or her timing mechanism in organic accord with a macrocosmic system. It allows the individual to reclaim power that has been subordinated to the organized, external world timing.1
This passage feels particularly relevant for the dawn of the Winter season, when nature’s timing might feel particularly inconvenient. Instead of embracing the opportunity to pause, we live in a culture that exalts forward momentum, as if we could live in constant daylight to “get things done.” The process of looking inward tends to take a backseat to our sense of duty and obligation, whether that means showing up for loved ones or launching that next marketing campaign. And it may be particularly tempting to avoid slowing down for those of us in touch with our Capricorn nature, which holds the parts of us that have the drive, resourcefulness, and mastery of time to get where we want to go.
But while the quiet and dark of the Winter Solstice may challenge our productivity mindset, Erin Sullivan reminds us of the inherent and natural wisdom of life’s constant spiral, and that our progress simply can’t be measured linearly. She continues her discussion of timing by stating that “progress is only measured by reflection on its worth, and by looking back one sees how far one has come.”2 Through self-reflection, and perhaps even self care, we can nurture and reference our own growth for the next cycle. Perhaps that’s the real measure of our progress; the fact that reaching the end often feels like the beginning again is actually the point.
Some of you may remember my astrology blog from 2019 called “Star Power”—my first venture into astrological writing. It was a short-lived project with just a handful of posts, which I put down after spooking myself a bit with a December 2019 post that imagined the upcoming year would be “incredibly heavy and transformational” (oh hello there, understatement).
I then drifted a bit from my astrology practice in the early months of 2020. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic happened to sync up with my Saturn Return, which is astrology-speak for a psychological rebirth of sorts. I found myself newly isolated in a new city, with a new job, and developed new spiritual practices in response to the very real “survival-mode” that many of us found ourselves in back then. I often have a hard time processing just how difficult all of that newness was for me, and I felt like a failure for years for not writing my way through that period (nice to see you again, self-doubt).
Now I can look back and appreciate the many renewals I’ve been through since December 2019, including six months ago when I launched this newsletter at the Summer Solstice. Nearly 5 years since my last astrology post, I found my light once again and birthed this new creative project—one that’s allowed me to share my love of the cosmos and my living experience of them with the world. In some ways, it feels like I’m right back where I started.
Capricorn season lining up with the Winter Solstice reminds me that we can revisit past versions of ourselves as a way to be in touch with our own progress. When I read some of those old “Star Power” posts and revisited 2019 Sunny, I was sure that I’d find each post to be full of naive insights and astrological inaccuracies. Something to show that I hadn’t wasted time, and that I needed the last five years in order to really be an astrologer. But the truth is, that newsletter reads a lot like this one. Sure I’ve grown in ways, but 2019 Sunny carried a similar light as I do now. This is not a story of how I am so much more successful than I was five years ago. I’m simply doing it all again.
Studying the constant cycles of the cosmos has taught me that life seems to give us the same opportunities again and again, though often dressed in different circumstances. We do change along the way, of course. We collect charms from the helpers that guide us, and we lose pieces of ourselves to the dragons we had to slay in order to cross new thresholds. But our journey often leads us back to somewhere strikingly familiar. Sometimes returning to a past version of yourself is as sure of a sign as any that you’re right on time.
So what do you do when you’re back where you started? Deeply embedded in the wisdom of Capricorn is actually a call to take good care of ourselves, which I think is key to this process of renewal. And as I’m starting to question some of my old ideas about success and failure, I’m learning that progress isn’t about delaying gratification to the point of skipping lunch and never taking naps. When we turn inward to reflect on ourselves and attune to our own needs, we build up the resilience that is needed to accomplish some of our biggest goals. We learn to be gentle with our newness. If you know someone with a Capricorn emphasis in their natal chart, you may have come into contact with a potential for self-containment. Perhaps that talent for creating a solid boundary is actually meant to be a vessel for nourishment. A cozy corner for renewal. A magical power to hold and be held in a way that can sustain us for all of Winter.
With that, I want to thank you all for how you’ve held me this year, and willingly accepted the light of cosmic wisdom that I’ve found myself returning to. Now that the sun is nestled into the sturdiness of Capricorn, I’m inclined to look inwards towards what I need to give myself to honor my own journey of renewal. I’m looking forward to spending more time in the dark. And although I know this tends to be a busy time of year with family and other kinds of obligations, my wish for you is some quiet time to be with yourself. Capricorn season is a potent time for self-reflection, and if you sit in the dark long enough, you start to see your own light. You realize that you are the sun. From there, just about anything is possible.
So let me be among the first to welcome you to your own renewal. The gradual increase of light upon us may soon lead you to start climbing a metaphorical mountain or plotting your own cosmic comeback; soon enough, you may feel like all of your hard work has led you back to where you started. And if you’re lucky, that cyclic journey itself starts to feel like home.
With love and wisdom,
Sunny
Sullivan, E. (1999). Retrograde Planets: Traversing the Inner Landscape (p.57). Weiser Books
Sullivan, E. (1999). Retrograde Planets: Traversing the Inner Landscape (p.62). Weiser Books