To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

- Wendell Berry

Dear ones -

Back in the days when the coming of winter's darkness meant gathering around fires and lighting candles, not turning on screens and switching on electric lights, when the night sky was never diffused with bright city lights, winter solstice was about the return of the light.

In today's electric-light-filled world, it might well be a good time to celebrate/honor/engage deeply with darkness.

Which is part of why I so love Wendell Berry's poem, above.

And the book by Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark.

But before we get into stories about honoring darkness, it helps to look, at least briefly, at this whole light/dark thing. Not only as a physical thing - which is what this cosmic moment is about - but about how we engage with this powerful imagery at a metaphysical/metaphorical level.

Day/Night has led to a primary metaphor: the Light/Dark metaphor in many different cultures. It's a complex metaphor that means different things in different places. Sometimes, "darkness" is associated with bad/evil and "light" is associated with good/positive.

It's worth noting that the association of "dark" with "negative" is in no way shape or form an inherent connection. Sometimes, they are associated with balance. We've got a podcast episode coming out soon talking about circular time in some Native Alaskan communities, and in no way is darkness associated with death, sickness, or other forms of negativity. So many other metaphorical connections are possible with light/dark and day/night.

In the history of European colonization, however, "darkness" became associated with negativity, and that negativity was projected onto blackness/dark skinned people. Darkness-as-negative in the West has also been associated with the feminine (both feminine men and females); as darkness became associated with "bad/negative" then the feminine also became "bad."

Growing up Quaker, which is part of Christianity, we have a strong light/dark imagery in our religious symbolic imagination. God is associated with the Light. Thus, one "follows the light", "listens to the light", "tends the inner light", etc. Darkness is associated with the anti-Light; with confusion and ignorance; with arrogance and hatred and greed; with the errors of dominant culture (Quakers have a strong counter-culture part of them).

Spiritual development, in Quakerism and many other traditions, is all about "growing closer to the Light."

I'm not sure what the Greek mythological figure Icarus would say to that. Maybe something like - well, I tried to touch the sun, and it didn't go so well for me.....

Indeed, mythologies abound with the danger of becoming "too much" light.

Humans get to/got to be humans. Not dieties. There's a reason for that!

(Which doesn't mean that humans aren't an aspect of the Divine, which we can increasingly grow awareness of through releasing veils of ignorance, as understood in certain Indic cosmovisions of Tat Tvam Asi.... but it is to say that our very limitations are part of our gifts.)

All of the striving to become 'light'... has it gotten us confused?

Certainly, I sometimes find the terminology being used around light and dark confusing. When people around me talk about how we need to "turn towards the light" I'm not always sure what they are referring to.

Who is defining what counts as "light" ...and what is "darkness"?

Oh, and then there are always those who say, well, you don't know light without dark.

Which might be true, but that statement can lead to a lot of uncalled-for acquiescence.

I'm not literally light. I'm flesh and blood and (sometimes creaking) bones and breath and soul/spirit and a lot of personality and a significant amount of imagination and creativity and imperfection. I'm the dreams of my ancestors. I suspect that, whilst they were living, some of them might have found my queer ways to be the stuff of their nightmares. Or their daydreams. Who knows

I do know that I need my sleep. Preferably a fair amount of it. Thank goodness for the night and the sleep that I tend to associate with it! Including long nights! (Even as I am pushing myself to get outside every day for my 'evening' walk before 4 pm....)

I find more and more people turning towards metaphors that embrace various forms of darkness and unknowing and the kind of work that is not based on 'light' - from 'we need to become like mycelium networks' to 'we need to be like compost' to 'we need to work with our embodied knowings' (in the western light/dark metaphorical dichotomies, bodies are associated with darkness and the intellect with light) to fascinations with deep sea creatures and others who live very happily without light.

Some of this is, surely, an attempt to counter-balance a set of metaphors that have done a lot of damage.

Which is not to ridicule anyone's fear of the (actual) dark. Sometimes, fear of the dark is entirely appropriate.

Even though I've done a lot of work to try to shift how I'm working with the metaphors of light and dark, I still can find it hard to not say things like, 'we are living in dark times.' (There are a lot of reasons I resist those kinds of statements.) There's a lot of scary stuff going on right now... including the 1 billion dollars that the US government has agreed to give to ICE... and the accompanying lack of funding to climate, justice, disaster-response, healthcare and inter-related structures of support for everyday people and the planet.

But overly leaning into metaphors around "darkness" vs "light" when they are also associated with "good" and "bad" can be really problematic.

I want to, as my friend Rev Rhetta Morgan says, return innocence to the dark. To let the dark just be - darkness.

With that, I get to let daylight/sunlight just be that - daylight. Neither good or bad. It just is.

As am I. Neither good nor bad. Just another five-fingered creature. Who likes trees and dancing with tides and riding horses up hills and who sometimes walks into door frames (for reals).

And I'm also... learning. Leaning towards something that feels more like a big tree than just a ball of light. Strong enough that I don't need to carry the weapons that I've picked up, intentionally and unintentionally, over time. The seeds of war, as Quakers say, can be put aside, even as we nurture the seeds of peace.

Because in a world not of our making that seems far too full of weapons, we need to know what's what. And how to side-step landmines, if we can. And to keep on the work of turning, as they say, swords into ploughshares.

I don't think I have some kind of final answer around these metaphors. But I do encourage you to explore them. Especially during this season, when in the Northern hemisphere, the night is long and the days are short and there literally are a lot of weapons out there - and many trends at the moment seem to be pointing 2026 in a direction of increased violence.

These last few long nights I've enjoyed enjoying the darkness. Sometimes with candles. Sometimes with song. Sometimes just quiet darkness. During a season that has felt unusually busy (but maybe I'm just forgetting how busy last December was???), I've been pushing myself to take a chunk of time every day away from year-end obligations (social, work, family, financial, etc) and be with the waning of the light - the long darkness. It's been well worth the push.

There is still - always- the chance for greater peace.

Within the cover of the night and the growing light of the sun.

Solstice Blessings to you and your kin -

Sara Jolena

ps - Thanks to everyone who came to our Origin Stories/Christmas and New Years webinar! It was very engaging, and if you want to listen to the recording you can do so here.