This season, I’m working especially diligently to embrace the power of “wintering”, which also means harnessing that which we identify and feel as darkness. Sometimes circumstances create the (unwelcome) invitation and at other times, the season of winter provides a variety of metaphors to appreciate what stillness has to offer. If we’re really lucky (can you hear my sarcasm?), we stumble into both simultaneously. But really, these opportunities are the most effective portals into spiritual growth and change.
It can be a time of deep grief and painful contemplation.
An unraveling of the various layers of identity, or Ego, we ascribe to our self-worth.
However, the storm always holds the power of meeting our resiliency, uncovering new wisdom, and ultimately, transformation into a more evolved, true version of ourselves. Here is a poem that touches me deeply, and many of my clients, about this time.
I hope you enjoy.
Letter to the Others in the Dark
I am writing not to send you light,
but to let you know you are not alone
in the darkness.
I am here, too,
scribbling with no sight, no certainty
that the words on the page are legible,
no confidence you will receive this.
Still this impulse to reach out,
this longing to honor this deepening darkness,
though it is confusing, disorienting.
I find myself reminding myself
such darkness is natural, essential even,
and there is some comfort
in knowing this, in trusting I am part
of some great process, even though
it terrifies me. This is how the world
has been made and remade.
Of course we are no different
than stars. Perhaps you are not frightened.
But I am. Maybe this is why I reach out.
Because it takes so much courage
to trust the dark place, to attend to its demands,
to believe this is not the end, but a pause,
a stage between one world and another.
Please, don’t send me light either.
I don’t think I am ready yet, the pain still sharp,
not yet softened, not yet become wings,
though part of me longs to have already
arrived on the other side of transformation.
Perhaps you are reaching for me, too.
Perhaps you have already written
on this page, and because it is dark,
I can’t read what you’ve said.
Perhaps believing this makes me less alone.
And this is why I write.
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer