dark night

The Chinese symbol for crisis 危机 is composed of two elements: one signifies danger and the other opportunity.

we are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.

This is why the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bo

The darker the skies, the brighter the stars.

To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible. -Thich Nhat Hanh

Christ is always willing to die and resurrect himself, while Satan isn’t willing to die. It’s a metaphor to contrast two opposites: constant transformation (or, perpetual “molting”), vs., desperate ego-clinging. It’s about shedding frames vs. clutching frames.

Funny how this is embedded in the root of Christianity, yet the surface-level practice of

“Yet when we understand winter in the natural world, we realize that what we see out there is not death so much as dormancy. Some life has died, of course. But much of it has gone underground, into hibernation, awaiting a season of renewal and rebirth. So winter invites us to name whatever feels dead in us, to wonder whether it might in fact be dor