***Content note: this week’s issue deals with depression and has poetry that mentions suicide. I hope you still find it to be an ultimately hopeful message and also do take care while reading.***

Hello, sweet friends. December has historically been a harder month for me. I came to understand my own brain during a Pacific Northwest winter. Heart-stoppingly grey. It was a hard time to be a person. I was 21 and hopelessly depressed. I was stripped mentally bare and standing in the rain. I was writing a thesis about protective factors against suicide (of all things) and finding my protection lacking. I was vomiting up my latest attempt at prescription mood stabilization into a dingy bank of snow. This season still has echoes of the person I was then and it can be easy to slip slide sideways into a seasonal funk. If you are one to feel a thump of dread when the daylight hours shorten, you’re not alone. If December feels synonymous with darkness and darkness feels synonymous with despair, I’ve been there. 

Last week I finished reading The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. If ever there was a book of defiant aliveness (to quote my friend, Surabhi), this is it. The very first poem in the book is perfection. 

Deep bass and hallelujah, indeed. That is how I want December to feel. I want it to feel like a pair of bright blue fucking sneakers. Which may be a lot to ask for, but what if it wasn’t? What if I used all of what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls “the soft hard skills, grist from all that millstone grinding” to find ways to stay? And not just stay, but maybe even enjoy? 

Which is why this winter I’m set on welcoming in my very own Season of Light. Not to banish darkness, but to pendulate through it. To provide contrast. To remind myself of the beauty of this world where you cannot know one without knowing the other.

My friend Laura writes an amazing newsletter and a few years ago wrote an issue about loving winter. Quoting her here: “I love winter for a thousand thousand reasons, but most of all for the way it reveals the bones of things, illuminates what’s hidden. The true shapes of trees, the textures of darkness. Winter invites and requires me to sit with darkness, and with what darkness contains—quiet, transformation, change. I celebrate the Season of Light not in defiance of darkness, but in wonder at it. I fill my house with candles not to keep the darkness out, but to invite it in.”

I’ve been thinking a lot this year about darkness as fertile ground. A space where all forms are latent including the next iteration of me. Where I forged a shit ton of coping mechanisms that I get to bring with me into the light. They are the light. We are the light. We are the optimistic under-secretary to the sun-filled god of love, for Pete’s sake! 

A few things I’m doing this year to welcome in my Season of Light: 

• Lighting candles. So many candles. 

• Greeting dawn and twilight and other gentle liminal moments as dear friends.

• Working my way through this sweet advent calendar from Anna Brones.

• Using glitter. 

• Watching my kiddos wonder at every flake of snow and wondering right alongside them.

• Taking sunrise walks, sunset walks, moon walks.

• Sharing the wins in a WhatsApp accountability group full of photos of opting outside and the things that bring us joy in the winter months (this is our third year, please message me if you’d like to join!)

• Baking gingerbread with chunks of crystalized ginger. 

• Enjoying every warm beverage and every cozy blanket.

• Finding firesides and deepening the chats that exist beside them.

• Believing in possibility. 

• Believing in hope.

I hope you’ll join me, this season, in thinking about how good it feels to move through darkness only to be redrawn with each play of light. To wonder at darkness. To be with it. And then to step out of it. To find the world, anew, each morning. To feel the sun on your skin. To leap.