The Winter Solstice

This week prior to the Winter Solstice could be the darkest of the season. True, the week following your solstice can be just as dark, though the energy differs. After the solstice, the dark gets to be a tiny bit lighter on a daily basis as the world to be sure it around the Northern Hemisphere turns toward spring. But now, pre-solstice, we're also spinning further and further still into your dark. And it is so very, very dark.
The light has become steadily retreating daily since the summer solstice, the longest day and shortest night of year. Tip toeing slowly, silently away. The decrease may be so gradual that individuals barely noticed the almost imperceptible shift, the subtle loss, till the autumn equinox if the light of waking time and the dark with the night were in the same duration. Equinox in Latin means "equal night."
Come the fall, there isn't any denying the apparent disappearance on the sun. It certainly is getting darker and darker. The a lot more indirect rays of light skim by overhead in an almost horizontal angle, their energy and warmth barely reaching us below.  Their glow goes weak and wan, a diluted wash. Insipid. Depressing. All season long, direct sunlight has continued on its wayward course, receding ever further south. Further and further far from us. And now here we're also standing in the dark.
The first day of winter Solstice, the shortest day, the longest night of the season, can be as dark since it gets. The sun might be at its nadir, the furthest southern limit of the company's range, its terminus. And there it appears to be to want to keep for a while. At the solstice, sunlight rises and sets with the identical time day after day along with the length in the daylight hours continues to be same. The sun stands absolutely still, motionless, riveted. It has stopped retreating, yet hasn't did start to come back. Solstice in Latin means exactly that -- "sunshine stands still." Pausing, it hovers in pregnant hesitation before it returns on track again, resting before it begins its annual return trip throughout the equator into your Northern Hemisphere because of its homecoming. Back to us waiting here, hoping, longing, craving.

Tromso, Norway, population 40,000, situated around the Arctic coast just 200 miles south from the Arctic Circle, would be the furthest north settlement from a size on this planet visit here the winter sun sets there in November as well as doesn't rise again until late January. This sunless period is termed by the citizens, Mórketiden, the murky time, which is marked by dramatic increases of mental instability, physical illness, domestic violence, suicides, arrests, alcoholism, abusing drugs and poor school performance. One resident explained, "Morketiden brings about the worst qualities in people: envy, jealousy, suspicion. People get tense, restless and fearful. They become preoccupied with thoughts of death and suicide. They lose the ability to target and work holds back. People speak about the light constantly and long for sunshine to revisit."