People keep warm by a fire at Brentwood Farms Community Garden for the Deering Center Winter Solstice Gathering at dusk on Saturday. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Heral

Visitors to the Brentwood Farms Community Garden bundled up for a serene, but chilly, walk at dusk Saturday on the longest night of the year.

The Deering Center Neighborhood Association hosted its eighth annual winter solstice gathering at the garden this weekend, inviting people to reflect while walking around a spiral path marked with white fabric and lit with candles. Afterward, participants met at a bonfire for a ceremony honoring the year’s longest night – 15 hours and 6 minutes, from 4:07 p.m. to 7:13 a.m. Sunday.

“It was beautiful,” said Cassiah Sahl, of Old Orchard, after walking the path. “I really appreciated the instructions to notice the things around me. I noticed the pine trees, and then I noticed how cold it was.”

“It was really presencing,” Sahl added.

Davinica Nemtzow, of Portland, volunteered to help set up the event Saturday. Nemtzow has a plot at the community garden and learned about the solstice gathering from a fellow gardener.

People walk through a candle-lit labyrinth at Brentwood Farms Community Garden for the Deering Center Winter Solstice Gathering on Saturday evening. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Heral

“It’s a really special way for me to engage with our garden, and with this space, at a time when we’re not really here and it’s all shut down, and we get to see it in this hibernation state,” Nemtzow said. “I wouldn’t necessarily come to the garden in the winter otherwise, and it’s just really cool to get to do solstice stuff in the community.”

Nemtzow described feeling “mindful” during her own journey through the spiral.

“It’s usually in the snow, and I love this way of almost creating that similar feeling with having the white fabric and candles and just having this very manmade thing in this very natural space, and the labyrinth kind of being this spiraling and mixing of the two,” Nemtzow said.