Re-enchantment and Gratitude Day – Darkness

Posted on December 7, 2025 by Ryan Van Lenning

I am writing this pre-dawn in the stretched pregnant hour before the dance of the day, while stars are still singing soliloquies in the belly of night.

I’m drinking the landscape with a warm cup of earthy fir tip/lichen/turkey tail tea, and before I light a candle, I’m refllecting on how everything is born in the dark: seed sprouts, dreams, fires, flowering buds, stirrings of life incubating in wombs.

Yesterday was this month’s Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day, when we honor DARKNESS. But any day of these two weeks of the year leading up to the Solstice-the longest nights of the year- are a perfect time to slow down and embrace the season’s energies.

Could we begin to treat darkness as a Gift? An Elder? A Mystery?
A long-lost lover with whom we can reconnect?

Like so many other aspects of modern life, the OverCulture paves over the season of slowness and darkness. Yet there’s a reason for the seasons.

There will always be plenty of forces out there that have little respect for the wisdom of the season or the body, tempting us to do more things, be more things, buy more things, keep the lights on perhaps a little more than they need to be. Yet some part of us knows that if we incessantly try to perform summer in winter, or move at the pace of extraction culture, the consequences will be sure to show up as symptom (our body-heart-psyche will speak).

It is liberatory to re-claim our alignment with natural cycles and the pace of our bodies and the dark season. There are many beautiful ways to be with the Dark (see below for invitations). When we sip each season slowly (both inner and outer), we let the season season us. We feel the reflective turn and all the various species of surrender, and let the elemental alchemy do its work.

These deep autumn allurements can be a threshold into wondrous winter moments, calling for us to dream anew as we are offered the depth of darkness, rest, and surrender.

One way to do this: gift yourself a little ritual. Doesn’t have to be fancy, just a slow, intentional moment to check in with all parts of yourself:

How do I want to be in this season?
What does my body want?
What does my heart need?
What does darkness invite of me?
What is wanting to be set down for a den’s rest?

Let yourself be quiet in the dark for a few minutes in deep listening. Feel what tugs or messages arrive. Perhaps there is a gentle call for how you want to greet the season. But don’t you dare start making new year’s resolutions! That is Modernity’s productivity algorithm sneaking back in. There will be a time for that, but this is not the time of forward energy and plans, this is the time of downward energy and a pregnant pause.

I learned that the Inuit and Inupiaq peoples of the far north have a custom in preparation for the whale hunt. With no lamps lit, they sit in darkness, in stillness, and in qarrtsiluni, the state of one that waits for something to happen. One translation of qarrtsiluni:“sitting together in darkness waiting for something to burst” until melodies and words rise like bubbles in the sea as they rise and burst in the air. Such are whales honored with song.

What would it look and feel like if we allowed ourselves to honor the darkness and stillness and await the whale-songs of our lives to burst forth?

What would emerge in that fruitful darkness?

As a dispersed web of folks deepening into our own unique landscapes around a particular theme, we are participating in the movement during this Great Turning for the re-enchantment of our lives, re-belonging ourselves to the sacred web of life with our gratitude and awe.

The invitation is to participate byhonoring Darkness through words, intention, learning, ceremony, altars, song, or deep listening in your own landscape, at your own pace. See below for different invitations to celebrate Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day:

May you find your own best way to listen to your body and soul wisdom, to carve out your sacred pause, be with the darkness and sink into your season.