Yuletide

Light and Dark; luminous and shadow

Beloved Becoming Ones—

Tonight is a convergence.

The last Sunday of Advent.

The final night of Hanukkah.

The Winter Solstice—earth’s long inhale before the light begins its slow return.

For the last six weeks, I have been writing a Decolonial Advent, following the Eastern Orthodox calendar—lingering longer in the dark, refusing the rush to premature light. Advent, after all, is not a countdown to cheer. It is a discipline of waiting. A practice of staying with what is unresolved. A willingness to trust the dark soil of becoming.

We know this season.

Our bodies know it.

The land knows it.

Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, remembers a miracle as it is told in Jewish memory: the oil that should not have lasted, did. A small flame endured beyond its reasonable limits. When I sit with that story, I do not hear triumphalism. I hear tenderness. Fragility. Care. The kind of miracle that happens not through domination, but through persistence.

When I think about light, I think about the divine light that flickers within each of us—the ember that refuses extinction even in a socio-pathology of isolation, fragmentation, and fear. We live in a world that trains us to dim ourselves, to harden, to turn against one another. Nurturing that inner light is not sentimental work. It is disciplined, costly, and deeply political.

For as long as I can remember, I have been stepping away from oppositional politics—the exhausting us versus themreflex that flattens complexity and feeds the very systems it claims to resist. This turning is not easy. It requires what James Baldwin once called beginning again. Not once, but continually. Beginning again with humility. Beginning again with truth. Beginning again without the fantasy of moral purity.

It is five minutes past ten at night as I write this—into the thick of winter darkness. Some of you will read this in the quiet hours before dawn. Others may encounter it late at night, hovering in that threshold space where sleep and wakefulness blur, where something tender and unfinished stirs. Whenever you find these words, know this:

Holding both light and dark—luminance and shadow—is the work before us now.

The light is returning.

Not all at once.

Not without labor.

Not without grief.

It is being born again—slowly, stubbornly—through the work of composting what is death-dealing: the rage, the lies, the inherited violences, the bullshit that neoliberal democracy calls normal. The fire James Baldwin carried—his anger braided with love—feels familiar to me. I, too, am a witness to devastation. I, too, know how rage can both clarify and consume.

Tonight, I choose compost.

I return the anger to the soil.

I sit with the shadow without surrendering to it.

I practice coming back to myself—again and again—because this, too, is devotion.

As this day closes with its longest night, may we trust the slow intelligence of the light. May it find us—not as spectacle, but as warmth. Not as domination, but as guidance. Not as certainty, but as invitation.

In due time, may we be illumined.

Paz, —RCE+