Solstice Celebration: Across Light, Darkness, and Distance

New Year for the Global South

While for some, this is the longest day; for others this is the longest night and the beginning of the new year and the agricultural cycle. Wherever you are on Earth, we gather to honor the power of light and the wisdom of darkness, celebrating vitality where the sun is high, and tending quiet resilience where the night stretches long.

A Shared Flow for Grounding, Connection, and Collective Reflection

We’ll open with a gentle arrival: a moment to land in our bodies, notice the ground beneath us, wherever we are, and acknowledge the many lands and lineages that hold us. From there, we’ll move through a lightly guided flow with pauses for sensing, listening, and simple practices that invite connection with the more-than-human world. 

Throughout the gathering, we’ll create opportunities for conversation and reflection, where voices can be heard and stories can be shared without pressure or hierarchy. These rooms are invitations, not obligations, places to meet one another across distance, to exchange perspectives, and to remember that community can be both spacious and intimate. We’ll weave back together as a larger group, carrying threads from these encounters.

Inspiring words from Rana Bilal

Rana Bilal is a Sudanese trauma-informed facilitator, coach, trainer, and women’s leadership advocate whose work bridges collective healing, peacebuilding, and systems change. Since the start of the war in Sudan in 2023, she has worked with displaced Sudanese women across Uganda, Chad, Kenya, and Egypt, and is currently expanding her work with women in Ethiopia. She creates culturally rooted spaces for women affected by conflict, displacement, and systemic oppression, drawing from her background in community organizing, women-centered leadership, somatics, grief work, and collective healing practices. Her work supports women in reconnecting with their voice, resilience, and capacity to lead meaningful change within their communities. Having lived in the UK for the past 14 years, her journey has deepened her exploration of identity, belonging, and the crises of modern society, helping her build bridges between different cultures, worldviews, and ways of living. Rana is also a dentist and mother of two.

Moving through together

We’ll close by tending what has emerged: naming intentions, honoring what we’re ready to release, and acknowledging the cycles we’re each in. This is not a performance or a workshop to complete, but a shared container to inhabit, one shaped by care, curiosity, and respect for many ways of knowing. Come as you are, and bring with you a small object, a piece of nature, or simply your presence.

When living in community, even though we live miles and miles away, we share moments of light and darkness, challenging and easy flowing moments in which we support each other. Sometimes we find light in the depth of ‘our winter caves’ or in the sunlight outside, whichever the case we hold each other in challenging times and share love and joy too…

Together, we’ll make space to acknowledge the co-existence of light and darkness, holding complexity with honesty and care. 

We’ll mark this transition with a felt pause, when our attention and presence can move outward together, empowering good intentions towards the world. 

Details

This gathering will be a space to slow down, to arrive together, to reflect and share, and to reconnect with what matters most.

We are using a new event portal, so please register again even if you have joined us before.  It may look like an online shop, but all events are free. Simply complete the registration to receive a confirmation email, plus reminders to have the zoom link handy closer to the event.

Support our work

Our events are offered in the spirit of a gift economy, to remain accessible to all. You are warmly welcome to join freely. If you feel called, you may support this work through a one-time or recurring contribution, helping us to compensate guest speakers and interpreters and sustain this offering.

We look forward to gathering with you in this shared moment, under the same moon.

With care,

The Cultural Transformation Hosting Team

Transition Network International