I was driving down 8th street on my way to a first date—a day date at a coffee shop because we’re both moms and 1pm is when there’s childcare. The snowbanks were four feet tall and the gray sky hung down to touch them. It was one of those days that feels like early morning all day, sleepy and heavy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the sun. 

And that’s why, even more so, it struck me, stopped at that same stop sign I always stop at, that not only did I not hate all of this, but maybe, actually, my heart was opening here.

I moved back to my hometown, Duluth, Minnesota four years ago after fifteen years away. I moved here because of the water. Lake Superior is a sacred being. She defines this place, with icy blasts of blowing snow, rushes of life-giving spring rain, fierce storm waves. I came here to pray with the water and for the water. 

And it’s been hard. Duluth winters have always pressed me down, dimmed me into a cut-out silhouette, with endless days of cold and gray, long nights and a pale distant sun. Always longing for sun. But I’ve also been in a spiritual winter. Facing old traumas that lurk in familiar yet unexpected places, confronting the hollow displacement of not feeling safe enough to be myself in the very place that made my bones.

And all this with no lifeline to spiritual community. 

I paused my yoga practice at the same time I came back here. I didn’t belong in it anymore, wasn’t sure if I ever really had. In one of the last classes I attended, I remember emerging from a sun salutation with little blue crumbles of my compostable mat stuck to black pants. My mat was decomposing real-time, and as I looked around the room of people whose ancestors were European settlers like mine, I knew my practice was disintegrating along with it.

I never fell out of love with yoga. It just no longer felt right. Some of the misalignment was being queer in predominantly heteronormative yoga communities. But more so, it was that after years of trying, I could not find a way to be in right-relationship with the yogic tradition, as a white person. I grieved the awareness that I am, my own people are, so profoundly disconnected from our own ancestral traditions that we’ve gone looking for it elsewhere–and found it, but at a cost to the very cultures that share these gifts. 

Who am I in yoga, if I’m not in deep contact with my own ancestral traditions? A hungry ghost, I fear. Receiving but not in reciprocity, not giving back in any real way. 

I had some vague hope that moving back to Northern Minnesota, where many Scandinavian settlers arrived, could be a bridge back to my own ancestral traditions. But instead, I found heaviness, density, like deep mounds of snow in January. Even when I found potential connections; a book about runes or a teacher of Norse mythology, I felt no spark. It was like putting my hand up to a wall and pushing, over and over, never finding a doorway. I imagine this is collective trauma, I imagine this is also collective white shame. I imagine that healing on stolen land is not easy. 

I have been privileged to learn from Anishinaabe teachers, whose land I am a guest on. They turn me toward our interconnection, and I work toward this daily as an activist. And yet again, I can’t simply adopt their path, their practices. I have to face life directly.

So I’ve stepped outside of traditions. Bereft of spiritual community, instead I have cultivated a direct relationship with the elements. In the absence of tradition to guide me, I say “water, I love you.” I say this to the water in the lake, in my glass, in my own body. And this love has rooted into the trees, the earth, the plants, the entire living world around me.

Still, I long for the holding, the transmission, the passing down of wisdom, that happens within a spiritual tradition. I’ve been existing in some space outside of that, not because that’s what I want, but because that’s all that has felt true. Lonely, but true. And underneath some voice of internal pressure still says I should be reclaiming ancient ways. I should, at bare minimum, do a ritual on the solstice and the equinox. I should, I tell myself, but usually there is just this wall, closed doors. 

Last year on the Winter Solstice, my friend Ariella Rahma invited me to gather for a ritual on Zoom. There is the memory of the time before—gatherings around a fire, bodies, breath. Zoom is a pale outline. But we live in different cities, and her invitation had the subtle glimmering of a doorway.

Each in our own spaces, we lit candles. Ariella invited us to speak to the light. Focused on the candle, I found myself sharing an experience in India many years ago:

As an initiation ritual, I bathed in the Ganga, emerging from her purifying waters in a state of vulnerable openness. I saw the sun, a round, yellow-gold ball of fire in the sky, emanating down onto me. I spontaneously began a sun salutation on the sand, my palms at my heart, utter devotion for this life-giving force. I raised my hands over my head. I opened my chest, to feel in every cell of my body, light filling me, living me. Each movement a wave of life being pulsated by love for the sun.

I felt for the first time what a sun salutation truly is. I felt the sun inside me. I knew the sun inside me, how my life was only because of the sun. 

 As I shared this story into the darkness of winter solstice, I became aware of a longing to cultivate my relationship with light, the element of fire. For so long I’d been deep in the watery worlds of myself and our collective, healing trauma and giving my love to the water. Now a new spark emerged, one that called for balance, for light, fire. It’s ok to come out of these depths, and into the sun.

This was a doorway. But in the coming weeks I felt confusion about how to actually practice this. My lungs clenched cold inhales, Spring was so distant I didn’t dare dream of flowers. I wondered, do I need to go somewhere else, to pursue this new longing? Do I have to go to some other place, where the sun is more direct?

What I had learned in yoga, both philosophically and experientially, is that the sun is masculine, penetrating. That experience in India felt so far from what I was experiencing now—zero degrees, dark at 4 pm. But I have grown wary of the idea that I need to go elsewhere, and I know that these relationships with the natural world take time to develop, like a new lover.

On the days when the sun did shine, I stood still in a place where the light could fall upon me. It was ok to be soft and slow like this. 

And so that day in deep winter white on gray, on the way to the first date, I found my heart spontaneously opening here, expansive and tender. My yoga teacher used to say (probably still does) that the heart shines like the light of 10,000 suns. I’ve experienced this in other places I’ve lived. But it had never been safe enough, here, to allow myself to be so revealed.

Soon after, I went to learn from Emma Day, a community herbalist and wise woman who was drawn here to Northern Minnesota by the sacredness of this land. Emma is a longtime practitioner of Norse spirituality, who bridges ancestral practices with what is alive here, today. 

I’ve always known that my ancestors probably came here in part because it looks and feels like Norway, Finland, and Germany, and other Northern European places where they originated. This bioregion is so similar to the boreal forests of the Nordic lands. I never really thought about how that in and of itself is a spiritual connection between us. Even though we were colonized so long ago we don’t even keep track of the time before, we share some magic through the birch trees.

Emma shared about the Norse Goddess Freya, who is an embodiment of the solar feminine. This phrase, “solar feminine” was new yet felt familiar. Why had I never heard this before? I learned that in the bioregions where my ancestors came from, the sun is seen as feminine, embodying generativity, creativity, light, and love.

Sometimes words and distinctions can separate us from direct knowing of the world around us. But sometimes words and distinctions can actually open up direct awareness, bring clarity into view or validate a knowing. In this case, the words “solar feminine” suddenly shifted my entire experiential knowing of the sun. 

I had always been taught that the sun is masculine. I had been taught this through traditions that originate where the sun is intense and penetrating. Places and traditions that are not from my own ancestry. I was mostly taught this in the US, by American teachers, completely out of context from the place-based Indigenous wisdom from which these teachings originated. There’s so much I’m missing. 

It was momentarily disorienting to realize that my own direct experience of the sun has been, to some extent, mediated through a lens that doesn’t match my actual place-based experience of the sun. And this opened up a whole new space within me, to relate to the sun in a more honest way. Not as I want it to be, but as it actually is, here.

After class, I went to the end of Park Point, a nine-mile-long sandbar that juts out into Lake Superior. I walked a mile down the center of the forest, on an icy trail through stands of birch, pine, and aspen until I found a packed down trail in the snow to bring me to the lake. 

The shoreline was crackling ice, crunching like plates of glass under my feet. Where the open water met the frozen edge, ice caves burbled with dark water sloshing in and out. Long crystalline icicles edged the cave entrances. Each wave created a swishing of water mixed with ice that sounded like crickets. The sun’s soft warmth spread like a soft blanket over the sweet cold water, the ice formations, the tree-line of tall pines, and me. I felt the sun, and the blue sky, as a gentle shimmering, an interwoven embrace. 

The same sun shines on India and Norway and Minnesota, and yet, we are localized beings. The sun shines differently here in Northern Minnesota. Specificity matters. I want to be awake to the specificity. I don’t live in India. For a long time, I thought I would, and who knows, maybe I still will someday. But right now, I’m in Minnesota. And I sense how that specificity of sacred relationship with the animate world will heal the void left in generations cut off from our ancestral traditions.

This new awareness of the solar feminine is sweet nectar – to learn that my own ancestors had a different way of relating to the sun, based on the lived experience of their bioregion, a place much like where I am.

The sun comes out on very cold days. Only my cheeks are bare, but I stand receptive to the way the sun actually shines here, in the boreal forest in Winter.

Ultimately, I don’t even know what “masculine” and “feminine” are; they break down in meaning for me. They are helpful, as distinctions, to the extent that they allow me to be more present with and connected to the living world. If I put my mind on the words too long, they become mush, they become nothing, they fall away and dissolve. They are all the same sun. And yet, as a queer person exploring gender, there is something liberating about the idea that something so fundamental to life as the sun, could embody this fluidity. 

What really matters is that my direct relationship with the sun weaves me back into the greater whole. For this moment, the words “solar feminine” feel like a thread, tying me back through circles of time, to the ancestors who deeply knew the spirit of the land they inhabited.

~

All images by Minnesota photographer Tom Fisk.

Originally published in Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts