Celebrating the Light- December 19, 2025
Holiday Greetings
“Morning star comes out at night, without the dark there is no light. Let it be a dance.
Share the laughter, bear the pain, and round and round we go again,
Let it be a dance we do. May I have this dance with you?”
The above is from Let It Be a Dance, written more than fifty years ago by troubadour poet, folk singer, and Unitarian Universalist minister Ric Masten. I reread this poem every year as we approach Winter Solstice.
While we reach for the light during this time of year, I am reminded that there is wisdom in the darkness. There is gentleness in the stillness. Hope abides in the waiting. Light comes forth in the promise of rebirth, year after year as it always has. We continue to spin in the dance of dark and light, and Mother Earth celebrates the dance.
I’m so happy to connect with you, and I’m grateful that you subscribe to this newsletter! If you missed my last newsletter, you can read it here.
Important Dates to Remember- December 3, 2025
My Winter Solstice Tradition: Offering Gratitude
On Winter Solstice night, my friends and I begin our evening in darkness, except for one small candle and some incense burning. We sit in meditation for a few minutes, offering prayers of gratitude and supplication. As the evening goes on, we eat and drink and laugh and sing and play seasonal music we love. I listen to Gregorian chants, Celtic harps, and hammered dulcimers on repeat during this time of year.
Most importantly, we light more and more candles throughout the evening, and we light my Core Sound crab pot Christmas tree, until the house is ablaze in light. Click below to read the amazing story about how these trees made from crab pots came to be:
https://crabpottrees.com/about/
My offerings of gratitude include my gratitude for my connection to YOU! Please know how very honored I am that you read my work, take my courses, listen to my podcast, and connect with me in so many ways. YOU are the gift!
Candle-lighting on my Deb Bowen, Author Facebook Page
We’ve been lighting candles on the four Sunday evenings in a runup to Winter Solstice. We will light the fifth candle this coming Sunday, on Winter Solstice, December 21. Join us! It doesn’t matter what kind or color candle or how long you let them burn! What matters is that we celebrate the coming of the light together!
Holiday Gift Ideas
As we’re on the run-up to the holidays, I’d like to offer some “giving” suggestions to you that cost little or no money and can be accomplished gently and quietly:
Offer to do chores for someone who may be challenged. Here are some tasks you could do that only cost your time:
Clean spaces your friend might not be able to reach – both high and low (top of the refrigerator or the rear of a lower cupboard).
Do heavy chores – scrub the kitchen floor, lift something your friend needs moved.
Run errands.
Do yard work, or share cuttings from your plants.
Don’t ask your friend what you can do for him/her! Instead, try “I’d like to help you with some heavy cleaning. Can I come over Saturday morning?”
Make a donation in your friend’s honor to a charity you know your friend supports. For example, even now, more than a year later, you could support the recovery efforts as they continue in western North Carolina. So much will be needed for a long time.
If you feel called to do so, please support environmental organizations in your area. Our non-human kin and Mother Earth herself need so much assistance right now.
Give an experience instead of an object – a membership to a local museum, or a season ticket to theatre performances, for example. Your friend will probably remember this experience much longer than a tangible gift. And it would be great if you bought yourself the same gift so you could enjoy it together!
There is one object I do recommend as a gift, however: BOOKS! Buy books! Buy books directly from the author or from your local bookstores!
Whatever you choose to give to friends and family during the winter holidays, remember to give to yourself as well.
Give yourself permission to:
Take time each day for yourself
Relax and nurture your body, mind, and spirit
Laugh and find humor
Feel sad and overwhelmed, so long as you don’t stay with those emotions for long
Be alone to recharge your emotional batteries
Say “no” when you don’t want to do something, or engage with people
Ultimately, I’m suggesting that you don’t have to fall prey to the commercialism of the season. Remember this: You are the gift. Presence is a present.
Upcoming Course in the New Year:
A note about my perspective on Tarot: Tarot is so much more than a divination method. Its history reaches back so far that we don’t know its origins. Tarot has been used to relay messages between royal courts, to hide legends and teachings in plain sight, and to offer us metaphors and archetypes for our personal life lessons and journeys. My deep respect for Tarot crosses many boundaries, and my deepest gratitude is the way in which world beliefs, mythologies, cultures, and history join together in the images and meanings of the keys to guide our paths today. I so hope you’ll begin your Tarot journey to yourself in this course.
Unlocking the Mysteries of Tarot, my introductory Tarot course that teaches you how to begin reading Tarot, begins Tuesday, January 13, 2026. Registration deadline is Friday, January 9 at 5 pm eastern time. Enrollment is limited, and both the afternoon and evening sections are filling, so register soon! Click here for details: https://debbowen.com/product-category/new-category/
Book Recommendation
Where is home? What is your “place?” Finding our “place” requires us to rethink the meaning of that word, rethink who we are, who our “people” are – and more.
Author Janisse Ray’s writings and teaching have been guiding lights for me since she published her American Book Award memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood in 1999. Much more than a memoir, that book, and all her work since its publication, are clarion calls for us to save our “place” on the planet.
Ray’s newest work, Journey in Place, is the culmination of a year’s worth of exploration that she and a group of us dedicated to the process, undertook as we searched the deep richness of “place” and its myriad of meanings to each of us.
Ray’s gifts to you, the reader, in this book are the same exercises, prompts, and suggestions for further study that we undertook in the course. Here’s what she says about the book:
“Here you will find 52 explorations that will teach you how to travel more deeply into the place you find yourself, laying out a path for making an important difference in your life. Each exploration contains a micro-essay, a feet-on-the-ground exercise, a writing prompt, and further study.
• Become a scholar of your place.
• Deepen your relationship to it.
• Build more meaning into your life.
• Strengthen the fabric of life around you.
• Find a support network in the earth itself.
Most of us want to feel grounded, to feel a sense of belonging, to have a direct relationship with a landscape or a region or a piece of land, and to feel connected to other people… This book is for people who understand that something important is happening in our relationship to place and who want to figure that out.”
My Published Works
Click on the links below to read my most recent works in Salvation South:
“A Tale of Two Hauntings”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/a-tale-of-two-hauntings-essay-deb-bowen/
“Let No One Turn You Around”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/let-no-one-turn-you-around-joan-baez-essay-deb-bowen/
“Sunday Fatback”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/sunday-fatback-essay-deb-bowen/
“The Coyote’s Journey”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/the-coyotes-journey-nature-essay-deb-bowen/
“Takin’ Up a Poundin’”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/takin-up-a-poundin-christmas-story-deb-bowen/
“Tidal Wave Terror”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/ground-truth-from-the-climate-reckoning-janisse-ray/
“Where I’m From: Seven Decades in Seven Scenes”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/where-im-from-seven-decades-in-seven-scenes-deb-bowen-poem/
“Mending Nets”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/mending-nets-north-carolina-barrier-island/?mc_cid=c4bb217ffc&mc_eid=fae2a9a622
“A Talisman for Poseidon”
https://www.salvationsouth.com/a-talisman-from-poseidon-hurricane-donna-1960/
Podcast
Psychic Teachers
Deb’s Facebook Pages
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Deb Bowen, Author
PsychicTeachers
Please note: Recently we’ve had several copycat pages pretending to be me or Samantha but we will never send friend requests or offer services through Facebook comments on any of my Facebook pages. If you have any questions regarding our communications, please contact me via my email. deb.bowen.crone@gmail.com
Just One More Thing Before You Go
“…the Wheel of the Year spins and spins ever onward and that every being is connected to every other being on Mother Earth. Suddenly, the house is ablaze in light, and we celebrate the promise and hope and light of the days to come.” - Deb Bowen, from Takin’ Up a Poundin’
Thank you!
I love your traditions to welcome the light! It's only been a couple of weeks, but I feel it's gaining on us!
Blessings to you, Deb! I appreciate that you point out how Janisse's book may offer some much needed grounding - all the astrological Fire and Air will certainly unground most people as the year progresses!