The Good Dark

words for hibernation

The Good Dark

Bring what you have gathered

to your winter hiding place.

It matters not how scant,

for now the light slants

in praise of

the good dark

where spareness kindles a

diminished heart,

weathered from toil,

aflame,

your hermitage of bark

illumined

with glad oil.

What is needed for renewal

will not pass you by.

Yes, the starving cold

could claim your soul.

On December’s longest night

you will curl up,

ragged and quiet,

ears down in supplication

as you near the end

and then, impossibly,

something wild and warm blooded

will come in

and give itself

for the sake of your life.

---

Dear friends,

I am writing you from my personal hermitage, which also functions as a bed. These days, I spend most of my time here. My body has shed the last vestiges of autumn and decided I am in need of deep sabbath work.

I can’t say I’m pleased to spend the majority of my time here, nor would I often call it restful. I would much rather be out in the world; hiking or getting coffee with friends or dancing with my partner. I even miss chores. It gets lonely watching life go by while you wait to be well; while you attempt to nurture the small embers of hope that remain, even as they are ceaselessly diminished in the great damp fog of weariness.

There are prayers that get harder to pray the longer you wait.

As we journey deeper into the darkest half of the year, I find myself contemplating the winter season I inhabit currently, and have inhabited for nearly a year. Goodness feels quite sparse here, and I yearn for the tender renewal I felt in past springtime seasons of life.

I must hope, despite my fervency sometimes to give up, that winter is a holy womb where we are nurtured and restored. The rarified intimacy of death felt closely yet redeemed.

I think many of us, after experiencing deep grief or loss, hope for renewal to find us again. For the sun to shine its face upon us at last. For the wind to find us and leave us red cheeked and hallowed with life. Something thawed deep within us, supple and sap. We dream of lumbering out from our hibernal home, our sense of love keen and brightening and wild.

But griefs become compounded, layering upon each other like icy strata, calcified sediment bearing testament to complex trauma. A history of too much bleeding.

I entered 2025 desiring to emerge from my griefs green and shining only to find myself with no choice but to let go of everything I had worked so hard to hold onto. Dreams great and small fell to the Earth, vivid as fire. My bare heart cloaked in frost and snow.

Some years, winter pads to our threshold, its dark coat burnished with stars, and asks to stay.

It is here that Love, in all of its strange, luminous wisdom, asks us to rest and repair.

The good dark given as medicine for our weary, needful hearts.

---

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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