How Much Light Do we Really Need?

solstice time, and the problem of “hope”

In an audio story¹ I recently listened to with my son, a story in which the brother and sister Martin and Sylvia (favorite characters of ours) go on their annual Martinmas lantern walk with their parents, the above question nearly brought me to tears. At the end of their lantern walk, the four family members are standing in their yard with their handmade lanterns under a black sky—clouds having obscured the moon and stars—and they decide to experiment by blowing them out one by one to see the change in the light.

Then, when only Sylvia’s lantern is left burning—five year-old Sylvia who had been worried at the start that the little tea lights wouldn’t be bright enough to walk by—the four stand quietly around it for a moment until she begins to move toward the house and they all follow, “huddled, peacefully around the single little flame of Sylvia’s lantern.”

The story ends with the words, “A little bit of light, it was enough to lead them all back home.”

Martinmas lantern walk, artist unknown

I’ve been holding this story, this query, these past few weeks as the nights have lengthened and cold has finally settled over NC’s piedmont region. The question of how much light we really need feels deeply personal this week as I grieve the unexpected death of my oldest friend, and attend to my father in the hospital. The question is also collective, as so many of us process the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and what the results are likely to have in store for so many vulnerable people (both human and nonhuman) and places, grapple with how to live in the metacrisis, and take stock of how we arrived where we find ourselves.

The truth I’m holding is two-fold: that we often need less light than we think we do, and that we could also sure use more than we have.

The seasonal cycle and centuries of ancestors in the northern hemisphere are with us though—so many of the holy days and rituals of the solstice time are about bringing what small light we can into the darkness of the season: from Advent to St. Lucia Day² to Martinmas to Hannukah, to Yule, and Christmas too. These celebrations remind us to both protect and share what light we have, to understand our small lights as a part of the larger one. The sun will return to us in its time and is always there, even when our part of the earth has turned away from its loving warmth.

Sometimes, there’s not much to see by, but it’s enough because it has to be.

Yule fire, from The Wicked Griffin

All the talk about “hope” in relationship to the climate crisis or social justice movements can sometimes feel facile to me. Depending on the context, focusing on maintaining hope can feel Pollyanna-ish and naive, pat as to become meaningless, like a “Live Laugh Love” sign, or simply a slogan (as in Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns). If we cling to hope as a promise that “everything is going to be okay,” what is our individual and collective responsibility? And if we work hard—knocking on doors to canvas and writing hundreds of postcards and donating money to candidates and organizations—and things continue to get worse, where is our hope then?

Joanna Macy distinguishes this facile hope from what she calls “active hope,” which is “something you do rather than have.” And this “involves being clear what we hope for and then playing our role in the process of moving that way.” In contrast, Vanessa Andreotti warns against what she calls “projective hope” and “projective despair,” both of which assume a particular future outcome,³ and Dougald Hine suggests that “the kind of hope worth having now is the kind that lies on the far side of expectation, on the far side of despair.”⁴

Suggesting that people release their (projective) hope can be dangerous, of course, because despair is certainly no better.

For one possible path, I’m happy to have found, quite recently, the work of Cynthia Bourgeault (thank you to Jonathan Rowson who writes The Joyous Struggle, as well as to my mother!), a mystic and teacher in the Christian contemplative and Wisdom traditions. I don’t identify as Christian, but like Rowson, I’ve been finding insight in her work that goes beyond Christianity to touch the common understandings that we find across world religions and spiritual traditions. In her book Mystical Hope, Bourgeault writes:

Mystical hope is not tied to a good outcome, to the future. It lives a life of its own, seemingly without reference to external circumstances and conditions.

It has something to do with presence—not a future good outcome, but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by something intimately at hand.

I love this idea of hope not as something that comes from us, or that we choose to carry or don like a t-shirt, but as something preexisting, perhaps outside of time, that we can draw upon and light our little lanterns from.

St. Lucia procession last weekend in Raleigh, NC

Returning to little Sylvia on Martinmas, it's at a neighbor’s house, surrounded by the smiles and connections of community (a warm drink and crescent roll also helped, I’m sure) that Sylvia stops feeling afraid of the dark and begins feeling able to meet it. Looking around at her neighbors, her brother, the story notes:

“Then she felt something different. It was a kind of warmth and confidence that she felt, but she also felt strong. And then she realized that what she was feeling was brave. ‘Can we go out into the dark?’ She asked Mama.”

My wish for all of you this solstice season is that you tend your little flames carefully, and share them with those whose lights are dim. That you find moments of the kind of hope worth having. That we all keep practicing courage in the dark.

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Are there poems, songs, rituals, or other practices are you holding close right now that help you to maintain light and warmth in dark times?

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Thank you for your patience with me, as I missed a regular post last month. It has been a difficult season for reasons I mention in this post.

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1. If you have or educate young kids, I can’t recommend Sparkle Stories enough.

2. My very first post on this Substack was for last year’s St. Lucia Day, so it’s Wilderment’s first birthday this week! Read that first-ever post here.

3. See her book Hospicing Modernity

4. See his book, At Work in the Ruins.