Darkness & Light
tl;dr: On facing real darkness without losing faith in our shared capacity to care for one another, and grow into a more mature humanity.
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And that is the task before us now.
To make our lives - our communities, our callings, our corners of the world - into small but potent containers that can support initiatory ripening and developmental maturation.
To help one another cross the perilous threshold.
To awaken, again and again, to ourselves, to each other, to the living Earth, and to the fragile, astonishing possibility that we might yet grow into a species worthy of the planet that birthed us.
This note will land in your inbox on the last New Moon of 2025. A few days before the Winter Solstice, the darkest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
I hope things are starting to slow down for you. And that you are looking forward to some days of celebration and respite.
There is a reason why our ancestors across the breadth of this living planet paid attention to the movement of the stars, and the phases of the moon and our dance with the sun. Rites and temples connected to these cycles tell us that the ancient ones found it wise and important to pray and dance and sing and meditate and chant like we are all a part of it too.
This moment of pause as we turn towards the dark is also the moment when we learn to trust that there is light.
It is in this Winter Solstice juncture that we get to feel and remember that everything is included. That darkness and light are part of the same wholeness.
And sometimes that darkness is not symbolic or seasonal. It is social, political, and lived in human bodies.
For those of us in the United States and in all of those places that are directly impacted by the United States, it has not been the easiest year. It has been a time of disruption and turmoil. A time when many find it difficult to remember there is light. Or to find any richness in the dark.
I cannot speak as one whose family has been torn apart by detainment and deportation.
Sometimes the dark is really dark.
I know that those of us who are not (yet) experiencing the worst of this repression must find ways to support and stand for those who are.
I also know that this is not the first time that darkness seems to overcome. And that there is something powerful inside us. Something that refuses to die in our collective body. Something - an ancestral, thoroughly interconnected, creative life force - that lives across generations even when individual bodies don’t make it through.
And that is the something I mean to live and die by.
Whatever it is that makes it possible for us to accept what must be accepted and resist what must be resisted. Whatever it is that gives us the wisdom to keep turning towards each other. And awake to all the forces, the teeming aliveness of the wholeness of our planet. This reciprocal and relational way of being with all that is human and more than human.
Julian Norris is right. We have a task before us. And it is to make with our lives those “small but potent containers that can support initiatory ripening and developmental maturation.” Because we can’t do this without initiation. And we can’t do this without growing, without developing, without moving towards more maturity.
It’s time to redefine what we mean by adulting.
What we can do is stand by faith in our own capacity to become people who help one another cross the perilous threshold. Because that’s the only way anyone has ever made it through. With the help of others who come into the full understanding of something essential, that:
The only way for me to grow, and mature and develop is to be of support to others who also yearn to get through this threshold.
And so this becomes our central concern. To nurture the conditions that allow us to “awaken again and again.” To dare to find for ourselves that there is something important, even essential, in the darkness itself. That there is something here that makes us.
And so it is through this process that we choose, again and again, to unfold into the ensouled earthly beings we were born to become. Waking up to ourselves, to each other, and “to the fragile, astonishing possibility that we might yet grow into a species worthy of the planet that birthed us.”
