Waking up to the Dark: The Rich Gifts of Winter

I took a moment to capture these frost-covered leaves, so quiet and peaceful, on a tiny patch of grass next to a busy highway in front of the hospital where my father was staying.

Bare birch branches and a frost covered leaf reflect the long season of Wintering approaching. Gently the landscape reminds us of how deeply every living thing in the end, belongs intimately with the rich darkness of the earth.

I’m loving Clark Strand‘s book, Waking Up to the Dark: The Dark Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse, a book about being open to the darkness, the original dark womb from which all life emerges. Contrary to our current over-emphasis on the life-giving gift of light and the endless striving to celebrate gains and wins, Strand convincingly suggests that darkness and loss offers a potential for spiritual enrichment if we choose to harness it, fearlessly welcome it, and recognize how it connects us to the mystery of Deep Dark Time. He says, “We come from the dark, and we return to the dark. We are not merely in it, but of it. The darkness does our thinking when we let it, and it is the darkness in which we move” (22).

Over the past week, I have been in hospital next my father, a stroke survivor, as he goes through surgery to remove fluid from his brain which is affecting his cognitive capacities. He is in his winter season and I am overcome with emotion because he can no longer retrieve many words, does not understand everything that is happening around him. On the surface it seems that he is in cognitive decline, but remembering the wisdom of Strand’s book, perhaps my father is slowly accessing a depth of awareness only offered by those who are beginning their rite-of-passage into another world. When asked what the date is he says it’s 1903 and this only confirms how he is already slipping into the mystery of the non-linear, all encompassing Deep Dark Time. . .

A handcrafted linocut inspired by the Linnunraata, a Finno-Urgic folk-astronomy story about soul birds.

The season of winter offers us so many gifts not the least of which is that the season of dying is not about separation but belongs to us too. Many folktales that center around death and wintering offer us alternative ways to think about this season of life that provide a more expansive, wholistic, nuanced and nurturing framework through which we can make sense of and find comfort it what might otherwise be a deeply unsettling and terrifying time.

A swan at a park near my home.

The Linnunraata is one such folktale, a folk-astronomy story told by the Finno-Urgic peoples from the landscape we now know as Finland and Estonia. The Linnunraata is the word for Milky Way, but linnun also means “birds”, and‎ rata means “track”, referring to the Milky Way as the migratory path taken by birds towards their wintering grounds in Lintukoto, the home of the birds. These birds, sometimes in the form of geese, arctic loons, or white swans, are understood to be soul birds, or soul protectors, known as Sielulintu, who bring a human's soul to the body at the moment of birth, and carry the soul away at the moment of death. I love the way this folktale offers us a framework to think about our mortality and what happens after death within the context of our intimate belonging to a seasonal bird migration that we can witness coming and going every year. The story suggests humanity is carried and mothered by birds at these pivotal times in our lives, and what a beautiful way to understand our place in the universe: not as masters, controllers, conquerers of the planet, but in the position of being nurtured by and cradled in the feathered wings of a bird. It is a heartwarming story that weaves us back into kinship with the flock.

Weaver of the World

Francis Weller, in his book the Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, talks about how grief and joy are two different sides of the same coin. He asserts that without the courage to grieve we numb and anesthetize ourselves from fully experiencing a sense of aliveness, which also limits our capacity to experience joy. He says “There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive” and most certainly Linnunraata is a precious reminder of this timeless truth. Unfortunately we live in a grief-phobic, death-denying world. . .what Weller calls “grief amnesia” when culturally sanctioned rites and ceremonies for grief are few and far between. What the Linnunraata brings to light is the recognition that our ancestors thought grief work worthy of our time and energy, and important enough to be preserved in stories that would endure generations into the future.

The Weaver of the World is a White Mountain Apache folktale about a little old woman who sits eternally weaving together the fabric of the world, while a mischievous crow pecks and unravels all the thread strands of her weaving. Like the concept of Yin and Yang, the folkloric motif consisting of two opposing forces that work in tandem, one creating and one destroying, is hidden in plain sight in this folktale which is about how loss and creation are forever entwined into belonging with each other. The wisdom of this story is vital and compelling for us, especially in our contemporary world which is characterized by a focus only on winning, on gaining, on life while forgetting the other side, the dark side which serves as an incubator for potential new life. In the dark side of the ancient Yin Yang symbol there is a tiny spot of light which Strand likens to a seed planted in the darkness of the earth. With this image he reminds us once more how life needs to be enveloped in darkness in order to germinate, and how much we need the darkness to hold us, cradle us, nurture us in her womb before we can experience a birth or rebirth of some sort.

Michael Meade also offers reflections on the value of loss in his book Why The World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss. Meade explores how in contemporary times we are faced with apocalyptic narratives about the impending end of the world due to social and environmental turmoil. He considers this "end" as a transitional phase, a time of potential renewal and rebirth, drawing heavily from myths and folktales of apocalypse that reframe endings as potential beginnings. The book encourages readers to focus less on fear, and more on the potential for positive transformation that chaos and endings offer is, and urges us to utilize these times of disruption to discover deeper meaning and personal growth. He says “When the world rattles and the end seems near, go towards the roar. In the end, what we fear will not go away, for it indicates what we must go through in order to awaken, become more genuine, and live more fully”.

Selkie Triptych handmade linocut set.

The Irish folktale of Selkie is a poetic and lyrical rumination on how loss and wholeness can coexist. Selkie’s pelt is stolen and with it her capacity to return to the ocean where she belongs, yet when she finds it she must contend with the grief and loss that will come with leaving her child behind in order to return to her home in the ocean. Here the child connects both land and sea, is both a symbol of the husband who betrayed her as well as the joy of new life. This story reminds us of how sometimes there is sense of grief and separation that comes with something beautiful and authentic and how both these contradictory feelings can be felt at the same time. Certainly, we have all experienced a Selkie choice at one point or other in our lives. It reminds me of the words of Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, where she says “brokenness and beauty can sometimes intertwine”, and both Solnit and this folktale suggest that there is a crucial need to embrace, “complexities and uncertainties, with openings”. Finding one’s true self is about integrating all the inevitable pains, defects, woundings into one’s authentic story and this is the gift this folktale offers us, in spotted gray flippers, whiskers and a magical underwater world.

Folktales like the Linnunraata, Weaver of the World, and Selkie are storied landscapes of grief rooting deep in the timeless bedrock of human experience. Folktales like these are not just stories, but a quiet resistance to the scripted living of our contemporary lives that separates us from a natural immersion into the season of wintering to which we all belong. The question is whether we choose to stay detached or fully live in it,

Afterward

It has been a year since I wrote this post and on January 15, 2025 my father transitioned to the other side, the all encompassing deep dark womb of time/space. . .

Photo Credit: Philipp Pilz on Unsplash

Photo Credits:

Blog Post Cover (frosted leaves): Eugene Golovesov on Pexels

Header Photo (birches): Mikhail Luchin on Pexels

Seal Photo: Philipp Pilz on Unsplash

References:

Lake, Meredith Dr. (Host). “Awakening a Wonderous World Through Storytelling” with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. (Nov 2, 2023). ABC Soul Search Podcast. 

Meade, Michael (2012). Why The World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss. GreenFire Press

Strand, Clark (2022) Waking Up to the Dark: The Dark Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse. Monkfish Book Publishing

Solnit, Rebecca (2016) Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books

Weller, Francis (2015) Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books

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