Dear fellow change maker,
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Happy Winter Solstice. 🖤✨🔥☀️

Here in Scandinavia, these days are really dark. While the world around me rushes with frenzy to finish it all before the Christmas deadline, my whole being resists the mad tempo. I remind myself daily to slow down, sit quietly, and just be present.

In nature, this is a magical threshold, when it feels as if time is suspended between dark and light, past and future, and the moment of death and stillness before rebirth. For me, the solstice has, over the past few years, become the moment I actually celebrate.
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Wolf nights

In the pre-Christian Slavic and Slovenian beliefs, this is the time of dreams, rest, stories, intuition and insight. All domains of the dark, the underworld, ruled by Veles, the Slavic god of the underworld, often embodied as a wolf. Therefore, the twelve nights after the Winter Solstice are called wolf nights - a time of feral, devouring and instinctive wilderness.

It’s a time with heightened connection to our ancestors, nature and the cosmos - a time when our ancestors would watch over the sacred fire in the hearth, bless the house and observe the return of the light as the symbol of the rebirthing sun. It’s a sacred time of introspection, a time where conflict, friction and differences are set aside - if only for a while. It's a time of peace, calm and rest.

It is not a time for hustle - the harvest has been stored away, the animals are resting, so is the soil, and we are meant to as well. In the dark, things mature and ripen in their own time. We are not forcing anything; we are allowing things to emerge when they are ready.

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Shadow descent

For me, it feels like this whole year has been one long descent into the dark. I’ve been in the shadow territory of my subconscious: the things I didn’t want to acknowledge, everything I’ve exiled, suppressed, denied and feared. I’ve been reclaiming my inner wilderness, acknowledging my destructive side, aspects of myself I’ve long deemed unlovable and hid away from external gaze.

It was a reckoning, because so much of my inner work was actually touching upon threads of what is also our collective shadow: colonialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy and other oppressive paradigms. This is so important to me because when we deny these aspects of who we also are, we perpetuate the harm in the world.

So the descent into the dark is a threshold - an initiatory journey, the beginning of transformation. Without it, we cannot catalyse and reintegrate our exiled parts into a whole. We cannot return to light, neither individually nor collectively. These descents are crucial for systemic change.

And the thing is, if you spend much time in the dark, you make friends with it. I’ve learned to see in the dark, my senses sharpened, my instincts and intuition came back online. My dreams told their own story about my psyche’s invisible life. My presence was sharpened. And through it all, I’ve learned what is most true to me. My masks have fallen, torn, disintegrated - permanently this time. I’ve met my fear, and as I learned to listen to it and walk with it, I stopped running away from it. I stopped denying my power.

And I noticed how significant this change was when I recently found myself walking outside in the dark. It was out in nature, not entirely remote, but there was no one around. I found myself in the dark, unafraid. It felt like a moment of knowing I am of the dark, too.

This year has taught me just how powerful, feral and fecund the dark is. We may associate it with death, and deny it in any way conceivable, but the dark is full of possibility, new beginnings and new life. It is our shadow that holds the flicker of our inner light.

The writing on the wall

On my newly rearranged living room wall hangs a poster by the Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens. It reads:
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“In the absence of light, it is possible to create the brightest images within oneself.”
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I don’t think it’s only possible. It is crucial that we walk through the dark to find the light within. It is there that we can truly meet ourselves, all of who we are.
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What about you? What are you ready to meet in the dark?
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Stay wild 🖤🐺✨🔥☀️,

Martina

Winter reflection Which part of me knows how to walk in the dark? What have I exiled that is calling to be let out into the light? What am I ready to meet in the dark?

Hi, I'm Martina. I coach creative leaders, change-makers and teams through defining transitions. My approach is relational and focused on growing vibrant, trusting cultures full of life. Our work together serves a systemic paradigm shift towards a regenerative, life-affirming worldview. ​ I am committed to anti-racism and decolonisation, and all my paid client work enables me to support impact leaders and communities of the global majority through scholarships or pro-bono work. ​ And as for me - I am wildly intuitive, ancestrally rooted and happiest in treetops. 🌳 ​

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