The moon is still ruling the sky in the west, a bright white light in the inky blue, and it is only when you look to the east that you can see the blue is fading, a thin strip of pale sky showing below the grey-gathered clouds. Yet you would know it was the hour of dawn before you ever looked east, for walking through the dark garden there is such a clamour of birdsong. What a wonder that they wake and welcome the dawn each day, no matter the hour or the weather.

The garden that at first seems a dark, alien place is warmed by their sound, and the far rumble of cars and trains, and the distant light in a bedroom window. I have been here five minutes and already the sky has changed, the light is diluting the dark and the blue at the edge has been washed away by pale pearl grey. It is changing fast enough to see the difference but slow enough that you can’t notice the changing. It is still, there is no obvious movement of light or colour, just a steady increase of glow. The clouds have disappeared, and now there is a hint of yellow at the horizon, smiling at the still-sailing moon behind me.

We often resist change, the noisy destruction of what is known and the clumsy erection of what is to take its place. But each day we live through these subtle changes that our lives revolve around without noticing, a rhythm of body and earth. Each day brings the gift of new held in the arms of the familiar. I am sitting waiting in the womb of the day, and there on the horizon is Tuesday coming to meet me.

Yesterday was the solstice, the shortest day of the year. It hid behind the tatters of snow and the fear of more. It hid behind the focus on Christmas and the bustle to be ready. Silently, mysteriously, we have now moved back from the brink and are inexorably heading into the light, although it still feels the same, although the cold still hugs us like a friend.

The beginning of the return of the sun is also the beginning of winter. Like the yin and yang symbol where each has the other in its centre, we are not abandoned to winter, we are climbing back to the light, we are living in the rebirth of hope.

Hope is essential currency when so much of the fullness of living is shut away. We know the sun and summer will return, our hope is a solid substance that pulls us through the night. In the old days nothing was so sure – the return of the sun hung on our shoulders, our activities, our sacrifice, and our symbols of hope were the living greens that never died, the ivy and holly and their supernatural power that protected them from the long death.

We know better now about the ways of the sun and the cycles of plants. But we all still fear and face the long death. That is why Christmas nestles in its cradle of dark – not just to celebrate the gift of light but to remember the gift of God, coming to live with us when the days were bleak, sharing with us the power to outlast death.