Light Takes Work

The darkest night of the year is rife with tension, a moment when, from our earthly perspective, the sun nearly dies. It is an initiatory condition, not a rest. We are gestating in preparation for new light. Yule marks the total triumph of night, yet at the very height of its victory the seeds of its defeat are sown, because this threshold also begins the slow return of the sun as the days stretch, almost imperceptibly, toward brightness. This is why the quote strikes me so sharply now, when we celebrate the return of the light even though we still have months of darkness yet to endure.

As a therapist (and former physics major), though, I cannot view the hope longer daylight brings as something to mark passively. Merely looking toward the light echoes those comforting but vacant thought patterns that insist everything will improve if we simply believe hard enough. Hopium is a dangerous spiritual sugar rush that feels good, yet accelerates societal and psychic decay.

There is no easy light. Not cosmologically. Not spiritually. Not psychologically.

Light takes work.

Darkness is primordial and effortless. When the universe was young there were no stars. Very little light blazed in the blackness comprised mostly of hydrogen and helium. Gravity, like a dark beacon, slowly pulled the gasses together and continually pressed them into tighter, denser, and hotter clouds until, under all that pressure, the gasses fused and the atomic fires flared to life. Starlight is far from effortless, and the fuel is all that dull material lying around until time, heat, and pressure transform it.

The lights in your home are the result of electricity generated through the motion of water, wind, or incineration, transmuted into electrons zipping through wire. Campfires require fuel and friction to ignite.

From stars to hearthfires, light takes effort to maintain. Fuel, tending, rekindling.

The same principles hold for our inner and societal light.

Right now, in the midst of society’s growing polycrisis, it is tempting to collapse into the shadows of fear and paralysis. It is gravitational, entropy, the inner universe reverting to its natural state. And we can feel the light will never come.

It won’t if we don’t do the work.

Not that everyone needs formal therapy for healing, but we cannot and should not avoid our inner darkness. Properly done, therapy is alchemy. We are midwifing little suns. With our patient we enter their darkness, sitting with them in their own interior night like a mythic guide in the Underworld. We interrogate it, confront it, have honest dialogue with it. We help them grasp the fuel that is there, then pressure it, make a blazing sun from it that lights the world.

This is the work that makes stars.

The work to do now, in winter.

The dark half of the year is a crucible, a liminal and generative space.

This is your star forge. In spring we come out blazing.

This sapling of an idea grew into a more fleshed out blog post on my primary site here.