For the Love of Winter
From Darkness to Light
I. Solstice Sights
solstice and sensuous
serenity
soft and cruel
lights
empty eyelids
blink
apertures of
tomorrow,
overtures
of a first
light—
dawning in darkness again.
II. Wintering
Winter Solstice brings with it, solace—a quiet that grows inside darkness to bear a new light in our soul. Standing still at a pivotal turn of night, the day is already dawning behind us. To where can we turn our gaze, in moments of unseen reflection, where beauty has no eye to behold? What do we see in a night-sky of stars—satellites of our making or the lingering dust of stars, hanging like a memory or an afterthought? The limit of perception signals the boundary of our consciousness.
The world is a river of eros, a driving love who faces death. A returning current of light-in-everybody, flowing at the water’s edge. The past flickers like cigarette ash, dripping in the sun. A melting pond to recollect our thoughts within. A life to re-trace in clouds of smoke. An odorous remembrance is a fading fragrance, unless we capture it, and hold its breath in our soul once more.
Time echoes in the spaces between, where an etheric ignition sparks in silence. No dark without light, no light without shadow. In the evening, when the mountains hold the contours of night. When the synthetic pulse of politics seems two-thousand feet away; I hear the true, I see the beautiful. Not even the arms of the world can hold me from this precipice, a holy jumping-off place, from where I fall, to fly and scatter.
There is no deep essence to seek when the surface shows the truth. When light comes from darkness, there is no blame. Our wounds become a chasm, great divides for our mended hearts to ebb and flow within—whispering like winds through pines in the shadow of day.
III. Seeing is Love
Growth does not come from the clinical talk of “case”, with its pathologies, problems, or syndromes. The psyche as “unconscious” is an illuminated sea seen only at the nadir of night. What is conceived in darkness shrouds itself in shadow. The plumbing of childhood for endless memories is a flush of sickness, a fake death, sought in the mind instead of the heart. Our mires are a mirror, self-reflecting. Our complex is Oedipal; our self-sense is Narcissistic. Oedipus loses his eyes, Narcissus cannot see the water itself.
Myopia keeps our vision close and closed. Childhood is not reducible to an erogenous zone of life. Adulthood is not reducible to “shadow work” or the second half of life. Our shadow is not only emotional-sexual in nature. Shadow is cast when libido is caught—where libido is the élan vital, or vital force. The Sanskrit term śukra means “bright” and carries a complex meaning. In the celestial sense, śukra is the name of the planet Venus; in the earthly sense, śukra is seed; in the physiological sense, śukra is reproductive fluid. Śukra is an archetypal image of vital essence, seed, drop, potentiality, libido, energy, eros, and radiance. Śukra reveals the illuminating nature of the vital force. Libido is the imaginal radiance of love, and the unconscious is made conscious through its conductivity. Therefore, “when the imaginal is reached, the archetypal urge in the research is satisfied. The anxiety is quelled. The child, as it were, has come home”.1
Childhood is the origin myth of psychology; constitutional disease is the “original sin” of medicine. The fantasy of origins. A regressive methodology does not lead forward, but habitually backwards in a deep dive for repressed content. But the emergence of repressed psychic material is not caused by a search for it. Emergence is the natural movement of the psyche. The emergent nature of the psyche is evidenced in the phenomena of synchronicity and déjà vu; the psyche as an “acausal connecting principle”.2 What is needed is life, and death, spinning in a wheel of fire.
The alchemical ouroboros symbolizes the self-emergent and self-transforming quality of the life-force. Thus, life and death are not each a singular phenomenon, but energetic signs in a more comprehensive context—not separated but a dynamo where“death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life”.3
IV. Love is the Law of Cure
In a surprising counter to his signature pessimism, Freud remarked that “the secret of therapy is to cure through love”.45 If we favor a clinical interpretation of his statement, then we propose that Freud is only discussing the fulfillment of transference between analyst and analysand. Perhaps Freud’s statement is not technical at all, but a human observation of the mechanism of cure. Maybe healing need not be terrible, long-suffering, or masochistic. For this, we need more than a mind of analysis—we need a body for the soul to love with.
Futurity is equally a fantasy as origins. “Each complex projects a teleology about itself; how it will end, what purpose it has, how it can be resolved or brought to an end”.6 What has a beginning possesses a final cause, and wrapped in cycles of birth and death we remain. Wholeness, individuation, abreaction, and Self-Realization are the false idols of a future cure. Should we worship insecure optimism or bathe in blessed feeling, now?
Adi Da speaks of love as the only redemption:
Whoever loves in the present moment is not bound. This is the Divine Law. Where there is love, there is release of karma, or the effects of the past. To love is to be "forgiven", or released from past un-love and the destiny past un-love creates through accumulated reactions and the tendencies established by past experience.7
To forgive does not mean to forget. Forgiveness invokes remembrance—allowing “the remembrance of wrong” to be “transformed within a wider context”.8 In a letter to Jung, Freud remarked: “One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”.9 Is this the recovery of light from darkness? Does the unconscious need to be made conscious, and if so, what are its parameters? And, is it not consciousness itself that makes the unconscious conscious? Then, “the unconscious is Consciousness Itself”.10 There are no true opposites, only a fusion of sense and soul. Not a theoretical shift, but an artistic revolution; not talking-cure, but heart-awakening.
We need a navel for our thoughts and a psyche that breathes. Then the high and low are seen in the spaces between. Repression reveals itself as stagnation, and consciousness reveals itself in circulation. The many dark nights we have fought and suffered are not redeemed or regretted—they become our fidelity to the “dark side of the psyche”.11 In the “dark and depth of Earth’s unconsciousness”12 is a hidden soil, where the secret of a golden flower is un-told, today. When psyche ceases to be mind and becomes the body again, we will know love, in darkness and in light, hereafter.
Hillman, J. (2022). Loose Ends: primary papers in archetypal psychology (p. 39). Spring Publications.
Jung, C.G. (2011). Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle (R. Francis, Ed.). Princeton University Press.
Samraj, A.D. (2004). The Knee Of Listening (p. 23). Dawn Horse Press.
Freud, S. (1909). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis (SE 10: 151–318). Hogarth Press.
For further discussion of Freud’s statement, see Lev, G. (2023). Conditions for love: The psychoanalytic situation and the analyst’s emotions. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 32(2), 114–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2023.2171118
Hillman, J. (2022). Loose Ends: primary papers in archetypal psychology (p. 40). Spring Publications.
Samraj, A.D. (1993). The Incarnation of Love (p. 124). Dawn Horse Press.
Hillman, J. (2022). Loose Ends: primary papers in archetypal psychology (p. 85). Spring Publications.
Freud, S. (1960). Letters of Sigmund Freud (E. Freud, Ed.; T. Stern & J. Stern, Trans.; p. 258). Basic Books.
Samraj, A.D. (2009). The Aletheon (p. 1485). Dawn Horse Press.
Hillman, J. (2022). Loose Ends: primary papers in archetypal psychology (p. 88). Spring Publications.
Samraj, A.D. (2004). The Dawn Horse Testament (p. 241). Dawn Horse Press.