A Beautiful Mourning

I am in the deep heart of darkness, the archetypal dark night of the soul. Or as my mentor Sequoia is showing me—Winter. I have to face this, and I have to face it alone. I begin to develop a sense of relief that I don’t have friends or family to comfort me. Or more precisely, to distract me because all the distractions in the world could not take away my sorrow. In Elizabeth Lesser’s book, Broken Open, she talks about the wisdom of the Caribou Eskimos from northern Canada who understand that “true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering.”