Solstice comes from the Latin sol and sistere, meaning the sun stands still. For a few days around December 21, the sunrise seems to hold its place on the horizon before it turns and starts back toward us. Solstice is nature’s perfect pause.

I have always loved that pause. As a composer, I hear it as the rest written into a musical score, the beat of silence that gives every note around it its meaning.

Every December 21 since 2022, Jeremy and I have gone live from our studio to honor that pause. (Here in Florida, the solstice is also the one morning I can sometimes justify a sweater. Fifty-two degrees. Where’s my parka?) Each year, the bowls take us somewhere new. One year, it was to a small frozen planet where the light of a pink water lily rose up through the ice. Another year, a great stag led us through a waterfall of ice to a chamber of rose quartz where a single spark of new light was born. One year was almost entirely listening: calm, serenity, the sound of winter air, and an angel’s whisper we hadn’t planned at all.

Each winter solstice session invites us to pause and witness the return of the light. So many traditions of this season keep the same vigil, from the lit evergreen tree to the candles of Hanukkah; all are small flames tended faithfully until the days lengthen. The sound of the bowls keeps this vigilance in their own way, too. On these sacred days, it feels like the bowls often ask me to turn down the volume, which in hindsight makes perfect sense. They are inviting us into the dark silence of stillness.

I invite you to come as you are. Sit or lie down, and let yourself be carried by sound. Plenty of people peacefully drift in and out of sleep (and on the longest night of the year I’d call that honoring your body’s innate wisdom.)

Gather what light you need for the season ahead. Join me every year. Revisit and reimagine the light anew as we settle into spacious stillness.