dark season

This is a dark time. Which, of course, means as many things as the word dark can mean.

English, with its habit of layering meanings, asks dark to carry at least three significant senses. There is the figurative dark: sad, cheerless, even sinister. There is, of course, dark as the absence of light, inherited from Old English deorc. And then, bound into that same root, is dark as hidden, as concealed.

Much of 2025 has been subsumed by the figurative sense of darkness— the gloomy, joyless kind. Thanks to heavy, collective suffering. To the violence of fascism and inequality. To the splintering of connection. To the scarcity of hope.

Compounding the darkness, this season itself is dark in the most literal, absence-of-light sense. Clocks change; wind howls; rain breaks across the sky. Night is a malignancy. Bones are cold.

And then, too, there is the dark of what is hidden. What is concealed.

We often consider the Solstice a timestamp of waxing daylight, or an invitation to make fire, to center warmth and light in the midst of such blackness, but we might also take a moment to ask ourselves what the dark has cloaked itself over. What it has locked away. What it may bury.

Maybe the opposite of dark isn’t simply light. Maybe it is looking. Seeing. Maybe, as the Earth faithfully rotates, and the brightness of the sun returns—slowly but slowly— it does so for the sake of our attention.
What needs our attention. What needs our holding, our beholding, our caring.

My wish, my prayer, my blessing this Solstice is this:
For those of us reckoning with deep-seeded wounds,
with the ghosts and pangs of trauma;
For those of us wrenching the tangled refuse of old, broken ways of being;
For those of us plunged into the caverns of our own and our shared despair;
For those of us sick and shaking with the grief and pain that we bear and carry;
For those of us sunken, lonesome under the weighted cloak of darkness— that which has been hidden, concealed …

May we look. May we see.
May we shine the light of our attention on that which, like the Earth,
is ready to turn toward the sun.
To be warmed. To be beheld.
To be set on fire. To be freed.