Magical encounters on the Winter Solstice
A love story at City Hall and a waking dream in the streets of Brooklyn
Morgane and Alex moments after they were married, Alex is taking in the marriage certificate while Morgane holds his freshly ringed hand.
It was Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and magic was in the air. Morgane and Alex had a larger wedding planned in Mexico a few months away, but needed to tie the knot legally before they left. All the stars aligned, their family flew in for the Christmas Holiday and they managed to book a spot at New York City Marriage Bureau just a few short days before Christmas. The love was pouring out of these two. Even knowing they had a bigger celebration to come, the specialness of this moment was lost on no one. We taxied from city hall to an intimate dinner at their favorite restaurant, arriving just as the sun was setting.
Happily signing their marriage license at New York Marriage Bureau
Posing for photos just outside the courthouse.
I’ve always believed in the magic of Christmas. I was the last kid to admit that Santa doesn’t come down the chimney, but in all truth, I never really stopped believing. I still have a deeply rooted sense that miracles, large and small, are real. In recent years, in addition to celebrating Christmas with my family, the solstice has become an important part of my personal celebration of the seasonal arc of the year. I celebrate with dance and song, with ritual and with dream work. My dreaming is strongest when the days are short. I go to bed earlier, wake up later, and luxuriate in the dreaming. I have a visceral sense that my night dreaming bleeds over into the day. A sense that the spirits are living and present. It’s a liminal time of year when anything is possible.
Celebrating with family at their favorite restaurant.
One of the practices I had been working with this year in particular was incorporating the rosary into my meditation practice. I’d had a dream:
Rose Tattoo
I catch sight of my right hand and do a double take, a black and gray shaded rose tattoo covers the top of my hand. There are two lines emerging from the rose that lead to my ring finger. The bottom third of that finger, where you’d wear a ring, is filled by a black band that goes all the way around to the back. I wonder to myself if the ink on the inside of my hand will fade or disappear with time. I look at my left arm and see a line drawing of a smiling face peeking out at me. The same black band is on that ring finger as well.
When one of my dreaming sisters mirrored the dream back to me she suggested I read the book ‘The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary’ by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn. The rosary provided me with a few things I had been trying to link together at the time. I grew up in the Catholic faith so many of the prayers and traditions are written into my being. I stopped going to Church around the time I got to college and eventually found my way to yoga and other traditions that were embodied and held more of the answers I was seeking, yet I still had a longing to connect to my faith and my ancestors. I quickly found the rosary to be an incredibly simple and effective prayer tool. I already knew the prayers by heart and I could almost hypnotize myself with the mantra and drop into a deep seated place of trance.
I mention all this because this particular solstice blessed me with an unforgettable visit from the Virgin Mother. I had been praying the rosary for about six months at this point. I came home from Morgane and Alex’s wedding buzzing from all the joy and love. I immediately started looking through the photos out of sheer excitement. I was sitting at my desk when I heard it: drums and horns and voices singing outside my window. I live on a rather deserted strip of commercial space. I’m in the very unusual position in NYC of having basically no neighbors, and the few businesses downstairs from me were already closed on this particular evening. I couldn’t tell from up here what was going on downstairs, but I knew in my heart it was something extraordinary. I snatched my camera from my desk and ran downstairs and was greeted thus:
I had nowhere to place this in my realm of experiences. It was some sort of parade or celebration. The group continued marching down the street, I stood paralyzed for a moment, then ran back upstairs, grabbed more gear and coat and ran down the block after them. While most of the group were wearing these incredible oversized masks, one was dressed as a Jaguar with a whip and then there was a group of four unmasked women carrying a statue of the virgin mother on a palanquin.
I later learned the group is called Tecuanes San Rafael of Brooklyn. I reached out to them in every way I could find to try to work with them and photograph them again, but I’ve never received a response. I’ve checked their social pages and looked for schedules of where I can see them again, but all to no avail. All I can really say for sure is that it felt both like a waking dream and like a blessing of the highest order. It remains an experience that lives in the realm of the miraculous.