Blog Post Nine

Darkness, Creativity, Winter

Feburary 7, 2026

Many people dread the winter season. Understandably. It is cold. It is windy. Icy…. Snowy…. But what I, personally, always dread the most, is the encompassing, all-consuming darkness of this season. It starts to feel as if I am just stuck in this loop, day after day, in a void of never-ending darkness. Each day, checking the weather app on my phone for the new time of sunset. Small twinges of hope appear when the minutes progress further and further into the evening. Inching closer to a season with more light. Finally being released from the dreadful darkness.

 Winter is not all bad for me. The cold of the season is not my favorite, but I can deal ok. I like the snow. I find it dreamy and it always awakens a childlike wonder within me. I also enjoy the coziness of the season. Hot soups, warm bread. Steamy coffee or tea, cuddled up nose-deep in a book, with a blanket thrown over me and fuzzy socks on my feet, as the piercing air lingers outside. 

But the darkness has always been the most difficult part of winter to accept, for me. The dark in general makes me uncomfortable. As a child, it was always essential that I had either a night light or a dim light on when I went to sleep. Total blackout was a terrifying thought. 

One time, driving in a very remote area of Vermont, my boyfriend turned off our car lights, and we found ourselves in complete pitch blackness. 

“It’s like we turned the universe off,” he said. The eeriness stayed with me for a couple days. Without any source of light. It was as if nothing at all existed. 

In a recent book I read, one of the authors, Anna Luke, wrote a chapter that really resonated with me and inspired this week’s writing. She wrote about darkness. Specifically our deeply broken relationship with it in society. It is something to be avoided at almost all costs. She even referenced that common sayings like “in the dark” mean lost, ignorant, confused. We try to extinguish the darkness with city lights, night lights, porch lights, flash lights. The darkness is still there…. But we are just shining a light onto it. Into it. An almost radical view that the author held was why it is essential to not only embrace the dark, but that we must welcome it back into our society.

Why exactly are we so uncomfortable with darkness in our society? 

The fear of uncertainty. Lack of control. Being lost in the unknown. But, as an artist, our most creative work comes from the unknown. The darkness is what births creativity. It is the blank screen. The deep void. The blank canvas of reality.

The darkness represents unlimited potential and possibilities. It is the place where any path can be taken. Like the car lights going out, the universe ceased to exist. At least in appearance. Creativity is the manifestation of the limitless possibilities from the darkness. It makes form and color from what does not have that yet. Darkness is the womb of ideas and art, waiting to be birthed into the world.

We don’t even have to mean literal darkness. The metaphorical term of darkness is valuable in art as well. The darkness of life situations. Death, grief, sickness, heart break. The dark events of our lives, also are powerful tools in the creative process. 

Creativity does not thrive when we hang on tight to every little thing we know. To everything that is already brought into the light. Certain. Real. Proven. If the process is restricted, we may get “safe” art, but nothing revolutionary. A release of control is necessary for real creativity to bloom. To allow art to come from the places we cannot see with our eyes or mind. 

The darkness also draws us inward. Towards ourselves. There is less “out there” to perceive, so we become more aware of the subtleties within our own minds and bodies. Which can be frightening. When there is less sensory input outside of us, we tune in to what surfaces when we are otherwise distracted. A lot of it can be memories and emotions that are waiting behind the curtain for their own expression in the world. Almost as if they have their own conscious minds. 

As creatives, these are actually gold mines of artistic expression. The “out there” world can only give us so much to make art out of. Because it has already been brought into the light and had its chance for expression. But what is within us, is infinite. It is in the darkness of our being and psyche. Not yet expressed. Not yet brought out into the light of the world. Our own deep emotions, love stories, loss stories, and life stories. 

With my avoidance tendencies toward the dark, I thought I would struggle to get through this winter. I expected the darkness and the cold to dampen my mood. To put me in a low level depression. But quite unexpectedly, I’ve had some weird creative burst this season. Idea after idea seems to pop into my head. Projects, activities, events that I want to do. There is an excitement and yearning to bring these things all to fruition. Even overwhelming at times, because the urge is so strong, but my plate already feels nearly full.  

And I wonder why all these creative ideas pop up now. 

I have been doing quite a lot of inward work the last couple of years. This has led me to go digging into my own psyche. An expedition into the darkness of my own being. As I went deeper on the journey, sometimes what I pulled out on my escapades was frightening. Sometimes they were joyous. But what I have found at the bottom, after pulling away all the gunk and the junk from the past was a little girl who was sitting in this pit of darkness, timid, waiting to be saved. Waiting to be acknowledged. I came down to first show why this darkness had actually been her protection from the world for years. A shadow casted over certain labels, memories, and emotions at the time that were not safe for their own expression yet. But I proved to her that eventually my adult self would come to save her. Shine a lot on all those shadows of protection that were casted many years ago. And when I pulled her out and up into the light, something else came along with her.

The creativity of a child and her innate need to play. And as I pull out more of her repressed identity from this darkness, bursts of creativity surge through my mind and body. Activities that she never fully was able to follow through on. Either because by a certain age society told her there was no time for that anymore, or because someone made her feel foolish for working on something she had no skill at.

There is a childlike excitement that comes with allowing myself to actually try these things now. No expectations. Not trying to be good. Doing it for the creativity and expression of it. That is it. 

Because really, life is one creative journey on the universal canvas anyways. 

I am coming to realize that living creatively is essential to being human. But not just living it. Expressing it however we are called to. We are in a creative dance with reality. 

So in this winter season, it hasn’t been about accepting the cold or the slowness like past years. It has been about recovering the power and the gift of the darkness. Working on healing the discomfort and deep fear of it. By healing my inner child, I can heal my fears of the dark, as I show her she was always safe, protected, and loved. But going into that unknown territory of healing and my own mind, has proven to me the ability for our vast amount of creative expression. I was only able to do that by shutting the outer world off and relaxing into a soothing, unlimited, vast darkness and uncertainty. And each time I do this, I release the fear ever-so-slightly more. So maybe as a collective, we can all reconnect with our creative potential, by instead of dreading the winter, reconceptualize it as the womb season of mother nature. Where she holds us lovingly in darkness, to plant our seeds of creativity for the coming year. And instead of floating in a terror of the unknown, we are held in this dark, loving embrace, of unlimited potential to express ourselves and our lives in limitless ways in the world.