Winter: The Season of Dark Wonder
It is dark these days. Literally.
This time of year in the northern latitudes, the sun rises close to 8am and sets around 4:30pm, leaving just about eight to nine hours of daylight. During the summer, of course, the light is reversed, and sunset strolls down the street are illuminated as late as 10pm. But now, we are in the season of quiet, dimness, and decay, as the fall leaves have long layered the ground, slippery with rot.
It’s easy to slip right along with them into a feeling of restless stagnancy. Winter is hard, particularly in this culture of constant motion and production, especially after a couple years of thwarted movement.
My body becomes tense and shivering to protect from the cold. I can sometimes feel the tension all the way to my core, all the way to my heart, which feels simultaneously tender and tight. This is a season of paradox in this way: yearning for comfort while feeling sluggish and guarded against it. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so there is some part of me that knows this rhythm, but even now, after all these years, I oscillate between braving the enlivening crisp of a winter walk and burying myself in bed to huddle up like a roly poly bug. As if I could curl tightly enough into myself, I might implode like a dark star and disappear.
There is so much wisdom being reclaimed and remembered about darkness. My own social media streams carry stories of seasons of hibernation, dreaming, and the creative void: the dark unknown from which new visions emerge. Darkness as a breach in the status quo. Darkness as fugitivity and escape toward the imaginative. The fertility of the dark, both in soil and in rest. This fertility requires death, the kind that nature shows us, allowing what has bloomed in the previous season to pass away and decompose on the surface to provide nutrients to the depths beneath.
In my healing work, I often offer up the idea that integration happens in rest. We plant, toil, and do the work to move through a life process. Then we must stop and be still. It’s the stillness that allows the pieces of our work to come together, settling into our bodies like tea leaves settling to the bottom of the pot. I think our most human selves recognize this wisdom, that maybe there is ease to be had in the darkness. But often it feels difficult. With stillness and quiet, things settle and they also arise. Whatever discomforts we distract ourselves from have the space to bubble forth. Hopefully, if we hold and breathe, those too settle. And so begins the constant distillation process of the self. We become the wide open space that life blinks through.
This fertility requires death, the kind that nature shows us, allowing what has bloomed in the previous season to pass away and decompose on the surface to provide nutrients to the depths beneath.
When I think of dark spaces — rooms with no light, the expanse of outer space — there are moments of tight breathlessness that arise inside me. Not being able to perceive any limits or boundaries is simultaneously liberating and terrifying. It allows the fear of endlessness to spread out. I remember reading a young adult novel in middle school about a family who had found life everlasting and the terror that struck me at the idea of going on and on and on. Life forever, and what then? Just more life? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I didn’t want to not have life but I couldn’t imagine wanting it forever.
This is why I struggle with these long nights in the far north, why both being still and reaching out feels hard. Though maybe there is a beauty in this too. Maybe the beauty is in admitting the difficulty, the truth of it, the plain honesty of recognizing when we are doing a thing that’s hard. Something in the body responds well to honesty, even if it is painful. There’s the potential relief of acceptance. We can sink into the sensuality of sorrow, or lean boldly into yearning for the goodness of life right alongside the face of grief. It’s amazing the unexpected pleasure the body might make room for once we are grounded with honesty about what we are really feeling. Perhaps not happiness, but at least it’s real.
Faced with the edgy worry about the boundless dark of winter, I realized that unless I took drastic measures I wouldn’t be able to avoid it — the worry or the dark. I thought of the most wondrous dark places I know with the hopes they could provide me some company. Caves, the deep sea, the forest at night, and of course, the dark heavens above.
It’s amazing the unexpected pleasure the body might make room for once we are grounded with honesty about what we are really feeling. Perhaps not happiness, but at least it’s real.
I’ve been reading about the cosmos, mostly in the context of race theory and quantum physics (yeah, it’s a lot). When I am huddled in bed like a winter bug, there are two things that have been returning to me from this study of cosmology. One is a Dogon origin myth that begins with all as one in the blackness of space and ends with a divine figure, stars spooling from their being, becoming the ancestor from which all humanity comes forth.
The other is part of a question from author Barbara A. Holmes as she considers what race might mean in the large span of the cosmos, “when darkness becomes a metaphor of power and cosmic predominance?”
Yes, I wonder, in the pre-dawn dimness, my head and body swaddled beneath thick blankets. I wonder not so much about race specifically in these moments, but more about what may happen if I let myself encounter something endless. The blankets add another layer of darkness between myself and the slow rising sun, and sometimes I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed. My breath is kept close and warm. Tucked in this intimate space, I let myself imagine a darkness that is infinite, sparked with stars and other bodies of light. I imagine my own body as a body of light, then as a dark body, then light again, then dark, back and forth, on and on and on. My own body, flickering and blinking within the cosmos.
Yes, I wonder. What might happen then?
