Dear Friends,

I write to you on this shortest day of the year in reflection of a solar cycle that can only be described as extraordinary and excruciating. Personally, and collectively.

Personally, many of you know that I lost my beloved dog Phoenix to bone cancer this year, while simultaneously managing to complete and defend my dissertation and earn my Ph.D. in depth psychology with an emphasis in Jungian (analytical) and archetypal studies (so much more on that later).

On the collective level, 2025 has brought the horrors of our greatest shadows to light in the United States. We have witnessed acts of inhumanity and terror that would have sounded only too outlandish for a film plot a mere few years ago.

During this solstice time of reflection, I hope you’ll consider these few things that have come to shape my outlook as I have sat with both profound loss and a resilience that continues to carve me into a rugged river valley…

 

Not one of us is immune—psychically, professionally, or spiritually—from the grief of our world.

As you sit in reflection of what has been and what will be, I encourage you to remember that nothing you do or experience or desire exists apart from the context of your culture. Yes, even the dreams you have—the ones that dot your list of goals and intentions—are often not entirely your own.

So, as you set your visions for 2026, be mindful of how the images of violence and injustice can inspire a doubling down on our learned selfishness. From the pangs of helplessness and sorrow, we might feel compelled to focus more narrowly on our own lives, our own dreams, our own personal needs and coffers. We might feel like what’s happening on the collective stage is beyond our conscious capacity, and beyond our emotional capacity, to tend to meaningfully.

This impulse, however, is learned. It merely reflects an individualistic and survivalist society that has taught all of us to abdicate our responsibilities to the community in favor of personal interest and security. Enlightenment (and even success) does not arise from avoiding or evading the influence of our culture and communities. Enlightenment is the awareness of how our contexts shape us. It is the acknowledgement of the narratives and values we perpetuate unconsciously because we are immersed in stories and beliefs that are greater than our own even if we don’t like them.

There is no spiritual context where you transcend your cultural circumstances if you are a human being.

 

Grief is love, but unexperienced grief breaks the heart and then hardens it into pieces.

Anybody who has ever felt loss can tell you that the depths of pain only mirror the profound expanses of love. But while grief is an expression of love, mourning is the way we move through it, face it, honor it, and become even more whole than we were before. Mourning maintains the tether to life, and to one another.

Culturally, we have lost the rituals of grief. We do not know how to mourn—let alone set aside the time to do so—and so the calamities of our time feel indigestible. And we become strangers.

We think we might drown if we stop long enough to deeply feel the world around us. So instead, we end up swallowing its tumults whole and hoping they will get broken down and managed somewhere other than in our emotional and spiritual lives.

The ensuing blockages harden our hearts and our bellies. Unfelt grief makes it difficult to have empathy and equanimity for the plight of all. This is what happens when we look away from the pain in the world and the planet as she changes. We also miss its beauty, and we fail to participate in either.

But your sorrow is a powerful gift of presence. Your sorrow honors those who have suffered, and it honors the parts of you that have suffered, endured, and survived.

Sorrow, transmuted by rituals of mourning, brings you into contact with that indestructible essence—the scintilla of spirit—that resides in your being. Grief strips you down to the studs, and mourning rebuilds the house in any kind of weather. Mourning is tending. Mourning is honoring. Mourning is how the heart expands after it shatters into something that has always been greater than the sum of its parts.

To live incarnated as a conscious being is to contend with a perpetual state of grief. At no point in the evolution of modern human culture was this not true. So, what makes so many of us believe we can opt out of the collective journey and still retain our civility, morality, and tenderness?

 

Finally, it is our comfort with the darkness that brings the spark of insight—and connection.

The collective strife of our culture and our individual experiences of grief are inextricably intertwined. To transcend the greatest challenges in our lives we must see our challenges within the histories and affronts that impact our entire communities. Not only that, but we must greet each other there in the shadows with a generosity of understanding: individual suffering does not reflect individual failure, but often a failure of the culture, which makes all of us participants.

Grief and pain are not private practices.

At this solstice point, instead of anticipating the coming of the light, contemplate the quality of the darkness. Consider the nature of the shade from which our soil is cultivated. The dark earthen corners of our lives breed and bloom the fruits of summer. Adjust your eyes to the darkness instead of training them on the horizon. The subtle nuances of your fantasies and hopes will begin to materialize.

The light is coming, no matter what. You do not need to look for it. But our humanity relies almost entirely on our capacity to sit in the dampness and voluminous emptiness of the void.

 

I’ll leave you all with those thoughts for now. So much more to come.

 

Erika Leigh Raney, Ph.D.

In defense of the deeply human in a post-human age.