News from Jules | 12.18.2023 | Be the Darkness
It isn’t unusual to need sunglasses in the high desert of Bend, Ore. at this time of year. Blue skies laced with thin clouds frame the white-capped Central Cascade mountain range just a few miles away. What is unusual is the bare streets, bare hands, and the bare mountain with only 26” of snow so far.
The natural El Niño phenomenon, first tracked in 1578 and arising every few years, has been brewing since June this year, according to NASA scientists. A slight rise in water temperature in the eastern Pacific shifts our sense of the seasons with its predictably unpredictable weather patterns. Even more so combined with our unnatural global warming.
Even as the climate changes radically, there is something that remains constant: the turning of our planet. Up in the Northern Hemisphere, we can count on Dec. 21 being the shortest day of the year—and the longest night.
On the winter solstice, we enter into a time of quiet, of cold, of darkness.
“Each of the four seasons is a growing season for the heart. If you sink your roots deeply into the soil of each season’s truth, it can become your mentor,” wrote Macrina Wiederkehr in The Circle of Life.
For several years now, I have started my new year on the spring equinox (instead of Jan. 1) as one of many small ways to live in harmony with nature as I track my own growth. At this time of year with three seasons complete and one to come, I start to wonder:
How much have I grown?
Have I learned everything I needed to?
Am I ready to solidify this growth into the deepest parts of my being?
Fearless is what I needed to re-learn in this year’s cycle of growth.
Or perhaps just to fear less.
The spring offered fundamental lessons to remember how to say heck yes!, be bold, be decisive, and go fast. The harder lessons emerged in the summer—how to live it now, go with the flow, find a way, face the fear, let go of expectations, and be carefree. And during the fall, I experienced the hardest lessons of how to embrace deadends, help, uncertainty, unexpected death, gratitude, reality, and all-consuming fear.
Listen to the Spotify playlist that’s been the soundtrack for my growth this year:
Instead of fearing less this year, I seemed to constantly face greater and deeper fears.
It didn’t get easier. I didn’t get stronger. But I did get wiser.
I noticed the fear. I named it. I felt it. I shared it. And I sat with it. I am sitting with it.
I noticed that as I grew my capacity to experience fear, instead of resist, ignore and/or suppress it, I also became more curious: Why is this happening? What are the shades of this experience? How dark is the darkness?
Like how I’ve acclimated to climbing mountains in the darkest—and it turns out the most beautiful—part of the night. At first it was foreign, now it feels natural.
This is what happens: Initially, the world gets so much smaller, only focused on the small spotlight of my headlamp, I am consumed by the darkness. I am alert. My ears perk up in the silence, my boots crunch through the snow, a brisk wind touches my face, the air tastes and smells like ice. Others find comfort in small talk, but I savor the nothingness within. As my eyes adjust, I notice how the night changes: the moon, the stars, the Milky Way, the clouds give way to more and more light. If I stay attuned to my surroundings, energy, and team, my body will tell me what to do.
Be with the fear.
Be the darkness.
Perhaps this is what winter has to teach us as well. This time of quiet, of cold, of darkness offers the opportunity to slow down, turn inward and sit with our experiences further. Let them fully sink in.
This El Niño season, even more so, inspires knowing winter differently. To listen to the quiet, instead of adding to the noise. To embrace the cold, not just endure it. To be outside more, and in the darkness.
See photos of the most beautiful part of the night on instagram.
We are afraid of the dark because we don’t know it as well as the day.
I am afraid of my fear because I don’t know it as well as my love.
Instead of lamenting the lack of light, the brisk wind, and the frozen earth as we hibernate through these shorter days and longer nights, can we sit with the darkness while also experiencing gradually coming back into the light?
Day by day.
Hour by hour.
Minute by minute.
May you sit in your darkness this week.
Love,
Jules