Light Takes Work
Why 'just choose light' is killing us.
There is a reason I left my first spiritual circle.
I'd come to the work seeking relief from a knotted mess of confused pain, the residue of steeping too long in the hurt of others without the internal skill to detach from it. I was looking for real answers. What I found instead were quintessential spiritual bypassers: people who believed that all you need to do is look toward the light and all will be well. Trust the universe. Choose love.
It was like having a gaping wound in your leg that needed tending and being told to focus on your arm, because there, no wound was apparent. What do you suppose happens to your leg?
Ironically, necrosis is very black.
I don't practice the wheel of the year because I actually believe lighting my Yule log is bringing back the sun. But inside myself I know that if I don't do the work of lighting that inner light, the sun won't come back for me. In the words of Dylan Thomas, I must ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’ inside, or succumb to the heat death of my own inner fire. Fall into the darkness of hopelessness and remain there, even as spring comes. The season turns. The light returns. But I stay dark.
So the Pratchett quote struck me because it names something cosmologically, mythologically, and psychologically true that I didn’t find in my early spiritual circles, but that offered a path to step back from my internal abyss.
Darkness got there first. Darkness is always already there, waiting.
And that changes everything about the nature of and genesis of light, and what we must do to attain it for ourselves and our modern cultures.
There Is No Easy Light
I began this essay at Yule. The darkest night of the year is rife with tension. From our earthly perspective, the sun nearly dies. It’s not something to be mourned, rather that longest night is an initiatory condition. We are gestating in preparation to kindle new light. Yule marks the total triumph of night, yet at the very height of its victory the seeds of its defeat are sown, because this threshold also begins the slow return of the sun as the days stretch, almost imperceptibly, toward brightness.
I cannot view the hope that longer daylight brings as something to mark passively with a Christmas tree and a card. Merely gesturing toward the light echoes those comforting but vacant thought patterns that insist everything will improve if we simply believe hard enough. Hopium is a dangerous spiritual sugar rush that feels good yet accelerates societal and psychic decay.
When the universe was young there were no stars. Very little light blazed in the blackness comprised mostly of hydrogen, helium, and vast stretches of dark matter. Gravity, like a dark beacon, slowly pulled the gases together and pressed them into tighter, denser, hotter clouds until, under all that pressure, the gases fused and the atomic fires flared to life. Starlight is far from effortless. The fuel is all that dull material lying around, waiting, until time, heat, and pressure transform it. Eventually, stars burn out, or explode, sending their material out for the next sun to gather.
Another cosmic reality suggests darkness is our primordial resting state. Space is expanding faster than light can cross it. There are regions of the universe lost beyond the reach of light forever, places where no photon will ever arrive. Darkness is not only primordial. It is perpetually ahead, indeed, it always gets there first.
On a universe-level scale, darkness is primary and eternal. It cannot be outrun. It can only be, temporarily and gloriously, inhabited and transformed with great struggle and effort.
The same dynamic plays out closer to home, at the level everyday experience. Fires burn out without tending and more dark fuel. To keep a flame alive requires constant effort. Our own cells, too, to continue our inner fire require the constant effort of food.
From stars to hearthfires, light takes effort to maintain. Fuel, tending, rekindling. Stars, fires, life, and even cultures are complex, ordered systems very far from their inert, dark states. They require constant energy to maintain their ordered complexity.
Left without tending, they don't merely rest. Entropy takes over, and they collapse toward their lowest energy, simpler state. Stars die. Fires burn out, leaving black charcoal. For psyches and cultures, things are a bit more complicated.
Fear, hopelessness, and exhaustion are waiting when we burn ourselves out. Depression, in a very real sense, is the psyche collapsing toward a lower-energy equilibrium. Emotional entropy winning the argument it is always quietly making.
In all things, then, darkness is the default. Light, like real hope, is a hard-won emergence. Requiring pressure, time, and much uncomfortable work to flare forth to light.
When the universe was young there were no stars. Very little light blazed in the blackness comprised mostly of hydrogen, helium, and vast stretches of dark matter. Gravity, like a dark beacon, slowly pulled the gases together and pressed them into tighter, denser, hotter clouds until, under all that pressure, the gases fused and the atomic fires flared to life. Starlight is far from effortless. The fuel is all that dull material lying around, waiting, until time, heat, and pressure transform it. Eventually, stars burn out, or explode, sending their material out for the next sun to gather.
Another cosmic reality suggests darkness is our primordial resting state. Space is expanding faster than light can cross it. There are regions of the universe lost beyond the reach of light forever, places where no photon will ever arrive. Darkness is not only primordial. It is perpetually ahead, indeed, it always gets there first.
On a universe-level scale, darkness is primary and eternal. It cannot be outrun. It can only be, temporarily and gloriously, inhabited and transformed with great struggle and effort.
The same dynamic plays out closer to home, at the level everyday experience. Fires burn out without tending and more dark fuel. To keep a flame alive requires constant effort. Our own cells, too, to continue our inner fire require the constant effort of food.
From stars to hearthfires, light takes effort to maintain. Fuel, tending, rekindling. Stars, fires, life, and even cultures are complex, ordered systems very far from their inert, dark states. They require constant energy to maintain their ordered complexity.
Left without tending, they don't merely rest. Entropy takes over, and they collapse toward their lowest energy, simpler state. Stars die. Fires burn out, leaving black charcoal. For psyches and cultures, things are a bit more complicated.
Fear, hopelessness, and exhaustion are waiting when we burn ourselves out. Depression, in a very real sense, is the psyche collapsing toward a lower-energy equilibrium. Emotional entropy winning the argument it is always quietly making.
In all things, then, darkness is the default. Light, like real hope, is a hard-won emergence. Requiring pressure, time, and much uncomfortable work to flare forth to light.
Our Internal Shadow Is the Fuel
The early alchemists understood something our current spiritual culture has often lost: transformation does not happen by avoiding the darker material. It happens by working with it. The denser the material, the more potential energy it contains. It is only by subjecting it to harsh conditions, pressure, friction, heat, tension, that the energy is released. Without these forces, nothing changes, and such transformation is usually deeply uncomfortable.
The shadow is not the enemy of transformation. It is the fuel.
This is what the love and light crowd misses entirely. They traipse around wagging their fingers at whoever has the temerity to cast the darkness even a sideways glance. They think illumination is choosing to focus on the positive. That is not creating light. They are not light workers. They are shadow dodgers. And unexamined shadow does not dissolve. It metastasizes.
Not everyone needs formal therapy, but we cannot and should not avoid our inner darkness. It is the starting condition from which the next light will burn, if we make it. Properly done, therapy is alchemy. We are midwifing little suns. With our patient we enter the darkness, sitting with them in their own interior night like a mythic guide in the underworld. We interrogate it, confront it, have honest dialogue with it. We help them grasp the fuel that is there, pressure it, make a blazing sun from it that lights the world.
In my own darkness, what I find is rage. The most annihilating feeling of all if I refuse to unmask it, because rage is a parasite. It latches onto a deeper feeling, masking it, blinding it so it cannot become the lesson. Underneath rage is usually grief, or fear, or love that has nowhere to go. The alchemy requires finding what is actually there beneath what presents itself.
That is the inner work.
But the furnace is not outside us. It is within us.
This is the work that makes stars.
The Societal Shadow
Everything true about the inner work is equally true at the collective level. Societies have shadows, too. Our culture is doing the same bypass it warns individuals against, just at civilizational scale.
It feels like our society is crumbling to darkness. Pathways that seemed brightly lit and clear have decayed, dismantled, and darkened. This is disorienting because when it gains control, the shadow dissolves the boundaries and certainties we rely on to navigate the world, forcing us into a landscape where our senses falter and our inner shadows grow louder. Fear, anger, and cruelty stalk dark times.
When a culture cannot bear to look at its own darkness, it does exactly what the unexamined individual psyche does. It projects. It finds a carrier for the disowned weight and hands it over, and that feels, temporarily, like relief. Like catharsis. Like action. But it is the same spiritual bypass, the same refusal to subject its darkness to examination, pressure, and effort, just operating at civilizational scale and with civilizational consequences.
The shadow of a culture, like the shadow of a person, does not dissolve when ignored.
And hops into the driver’s seat. And the denser the unexamined material becomes, the more volatile the eventual release. Compressed darkness becomes light only when the compression is conscious and oriented. Aimed without that orientation, it just becomes destruction.
Take heart, though, this moment is not the darkness winning. It is the darkness peaking as it does on Yule’s night, precisely the moment the conditions for light’s return. Not automatically. Only if we don't bypass it. Only if we step in, face the night, pick up our tools, and do the work.
No one is coming to save us.
Forging Our Stars
Here is where I have to be honest about my own frustration, because I think most people reading this feel it too. That what any one of us can do is insufficient to the sheer magnitude of the falling shadow.
I understand all of this in my mind. I do the work: in county government now, building programs for precarious and wounded people; in years of therapeutic practice midwifing those inner suns; in my writing, the mythology I work with, hoping to inspire transformation through fiction. I contact my representatives even in the grinding knowledge that the system is largely unresponsive.
And I still don't always know what to do with my bit of our collective shadow. Not at the scale the moment seems to demand.
That feeling, the incommensurability between what we understand and what we can actually do, is not weakness. It is not bypass. It is accurate perception of the actual scale of the polycrisis. Anyone who tells you they know exactly what will turn this around is either selling something or has not yet fully let the weight of it land.
What I've come to believe, slowly and reluctantly, is that just world that works for all life, if it comes, will not have been caused by someone’s singular heroic act. It will not be because we voted for the right person.
It will have been the accumulated, uncoordinated, locally specific forge work of people dragging forth the darkness and forging the light in their actual lives. Building the small containers where collective darkness can be held rather than projected. Where grief can metabolize rather than weaponize.
The work of consciousness and story, the mythological work, the psychological work, the writing of essays like this one in the hope that naming something true gives someone else permission to delve rather than project, is not supplementary to the political work. It is the aquifer underneath it. Cultures that lose their stories, their truth collapse toward the simplest, most destructive narratives available. We are watching that happen in real time. The antidote is not a better argument. It’s hammering, pressuring, and transforming our darkness into something gleaming.
Stars don't form alone. They form in nebulae, vast clouds where mutual gravity slowly gathers scattered material into denser regions until the conditions for fusion are met. The lone star is not the model. The cloud is. The community of practice. The small container where people are honest with each other about what they're carrying. The community council. The reading group. The therapy room.
You don't need to light the whole sky.
The dark half of the year is a star forge. A crucible. Not a rest. A deeply generative, dangerous, liminal space where the conditions for the next light are either built or squandered. The same is true of this political moment.
We are not waiting for spring. We are in the forge.
The darkness is the fuel. Use it.
Come out blazing.
