June 21st marks the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere.
For the northern hemisphere it’s the summer solstice – the longest day and shortest night.
Wherever you are, I hope that today you enjoy a moment of warmth, love and time to embrace the theme of regeneration, renewal and reflection.
For New Zealand the winter solstice occurs at either 3:31pm if you go by the Google auto generated result or 3:32pm according to the NZ Stardome Observatory Astronomy Winter calendar. And interestingly there is a difference between the length of daylight at the top of the North Island and the bottom of the Southland. With the bottom of the South Island barely breaking 8.5hrs of daylight for the day.
Though I don’t make the winter solstice a big event, it is always a day on the calendar that I look forward to. It’s the turning point when I can finally be uplifted by the hope of the return of more daylight hours and ideally better weather to be able to harness the sun’s power to power my home.
The key as you may have discovered in my episode Ebb & Flow of the Sunshine & PowerCuts podcast is that whether we are in tune with it or not, we are connected to the natural cycles of life, the ebb and flow of the seasons, and thus celebrating life during the darkest period resonates deeply for me.
This winter has been quite dark and difficult.
As the bad weather has really set in, it was almost typical and like the clear skies at night it was also ironic, that the backup generator which I rely heavily on in winter developed an issue that wouldn’t allow it to send a charge through to the inverter/charger to in turn recharge the battery bank. I wasn’t able to troubleshoot the problem myself and had to wait 4 days for help, but after a few hours on the 4th day the issue was resolved and the generator was back in action. Finally catching up on all the things that got put on hold while basic living necessities were the focus during the prolonged powercut.
When you live off-the-power-grid you rely on nature for electrical power. You are at the mercy of the elements, and also the reliability of the hardware that makes up your power system. So as I always like to say: always have alternatives for your alternatives… and even then…
This winter not only is the weather dark, rainy, cold and miserable, the power system and hot water capacity is still under extra pressure from excess demand. For my patrons who continue to light up my journey with their support, I have shared the recent resolution that has been developing to deal with this, and though I’ll probably have to struggle through the rest of winter before the solution is fully operational it is a huge relief (despite a huge extra investment of time, effort and resource) to be working on a fix.
Alas, as Victor Hugo said, “even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise!”
Today’s playlist is solidly the three albums that make up the Winter Solstice series by Windham Hill Artists, and I have the Ebb & Flow episode cued up for later.
Be warm, be well,
Until next time,
Heather x