Many of us soon will be marking the solstice, a day when the “sun stands still.” This literally is the meaning of the two Latin roots from which the word “solstice” comes. There are a multitude of ceremonies being held for the solstice, both for marking the start of winter and honoring this as the day of the year with the longest period of darkness. We see this solstice as a metaphor for going deeply within and emerging anew—as a kind of shamanic or spiritual journey of death and rebirth. Our metaphor is based on ancient metaphoric overlays, such as the winter solstice marking the death of the sun and its almost immediate resurrection. We connect it with the rhythms of nature, especially with plants that go dormant or animals that hibernate, experiencing a physical cessation of outward activity even while within they are recharging themselves for reentry into life.

But the “sun standing still” cannot be understood in a singular way. A solstice is a yanantin event: what for some people is a descent into darkness is for others an emergence into the light.

I think many of us forget that a solstice is the same event with completely different effects (and meanings and metaphoric overlays) depending on where you are in relation to the sun. A solstice marks the exact moment when half of the Earth is tilted the farthest away from the sun. At that same moment, half the Earth is tilted closer to the sun. So, for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere where the tilt is away from the sun, the December solstice marks the first day of winter and is the day with the longest period of darkness. But for those in the Southern Hemisphere, who are tilted toward the sun, this solstice marks the first day of summer and is the day with the longest period of daylight.

Yanantin is a relationship of two dissimilar but complementary energies, entities, or characteristics. Light and dark. Up and down. In and out. Love and hate. Joy and sorrow. Body and spirit. Each aspect of the duality maintains its innate individual character, while together they make up a unified whole, usually a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. The challenge when experiencing a yanantin is perceiving the unity within the apparent duality. That unity is the japu (Quechua), or the harmonious relationship of the two different aspects into a singular wholeness without subtracting anything from the completeness of each of the two energies. As writer Alan Watts says, and I think as most paqos would agree, “Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.”

The yanantin nature of a solstice is a reminder of how so much of the Pachamama—in this context meaning the entire physical world or cosmos—is comprised of yanantins. There are the distinctly physical yanantins, such as the juxtaposition of light and darkness at a solstice or the great ayni and yanantin of birth and death. And there are the distinctly human ones, such as feeling both the joys and pains of life or of our capacity to be both kind and cruel. We are yanantin beings both physically and psychologically (and in many other ways). I concur with screenwriter Joss Whedon’s opinion that “to accept duality is to earn identity.”

The core duality in relation to having identity is the distinction of self and other. For example, we negotiate the twin impulses of knowing and living as our authentic selves and of blending our sense of beingness into a shared communal identify. That yanantin is the motto on US currency: E pluribus unum: out of many, one. That is an ideal—a statement of a japu—and it is, of course, still an aspiration in the United States. But it does remind us of another important yanantin—that the world is both “out there” and “in here.” Each of us chooses how to be in the world, and the state of the world is the way we present our combined individual selves as a collective.

At the risk of stating the obvious, if we don’t like the state of the world out there, because of the nature of the yanantin we must look within ourselves to find the causes and to make the requisite changes. The state of the world—our collective expression—reflects our individual yanantin energies: we each are both light and dark, both sami and hucha, both beatific and horrific, both awake and asleep. Just as the solstice is both a period of long darkness and of long light depending on where we are on the Earth, each of us is both long in darkness and long in light, depending on the state of our inner “tilt.”

What are we tilted toward and away from? Our inner sun is the integrated Inka Seed (what we might call our drop of Creator or divine spirit) and sonqo ñawi (the energetic seat of our feelings, especially our capacity for love/munay). Together, these are the center of our mystical selves, and they are comprised only of sami, the light living energy, the most refined frequency of kawsay, which is the life-force energy. The Inka Seed and sonqo ñawi have no hucha—they never produce any heavy living energy, which is slow or sluggish sami/life force. Thus, when these two aspects of ourselves are integrated, they act like our “inner sun,” illuminating our sense of self and together generating our capacity for “identity.” One of the terms in Quechua for this identity is kanay, which roughly translates to “I am,” although it is imbued with the energy of the unfolding self, with the process of becoming who we “really” are. When we achieve kanay, we say that we not only know who we are but we also have the clarity of vision and the personal will to live as who we are (rather than as how our culture or others see us or want us to be).

I hope you will notice that when I ask “what are we tilted toward and away from?” I used the conjunction “and” instead of “or.” We are simultaneously partially in touch with and screened from our kanay. None of us are fully developed human beings, what in the tradition we would call beings of the sixth-level of consciousness, which is the level of the enlightened ones. At the sixth level we have reached japu (inner unity), but until then we are struggling to harmonize our yanantin aspects. The dual aspect of a solstice—where half the world is experiencing the darkest day of the year and the other half of the world is experiencing the brightest day of the year—is an apt metaphor for our yanantin inner world. The japu is that this yanantin it is all about the sun, which is always and only a source of light, although when it is screened, we experience shadow and even darkness. When in the shadows, we might forget that darkness is only possible if there is first a continual, stable light source.

The Inkas were the Children of the Sun, but for those of us on the Andean path today, it is not the physical outer sun that concerns us, but our inner light—our sami, which is the light living energy. As less than enlightened human beings, we have put up screens and filters around our Inka Seed so that our kanay energy is diminished or partially deflected, or even stalled or blocked. Einstein said that nothing happens until something moves. So, at this solstice, during this fleeting moment of “standing still,” perhaps as part of our ceremony we might undertake a self-examination of the yanantin nature of ourselves and our lives so that we can work through our darkness and shine with our greater light.

Part of our self-inquiry might be asking the following questions: How far am I tilted toward the self-illumination provided by an integrated Inka Seed and sonqo? How far am I tilted away from acknowledging and taking responsibility for my hucha? What are the causes of these deviations from my center, and what would it take to realign myself or course correct? How do I choose to move into the next season of my life?

Acknowledging and taking responsibility for our hucha—for how we are slowing the flow of or even blocking the movement of our life-force energy—is a glorious endeavor, for it helps us realize that there is unlimited light living energy available to us and within us. Perhaps as we honor and mark the solstice this year, we could take speaker, author, and former pastor Rob Bell’s advice to heart: “Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn’t as bright as it could be.”