On days that are particularly sweet, we heal the distance that opened up when we were bisected. What’s tangible and intangible in us works together. Our outside and our inside mingle and bless one another.

On those days, the body becomes a miraculous spacesuit, allowing the part of us that loves and wonders to breathe as we bounce around our lives feeling and thinking and trying to figure it all out.

When we’re feeling our way around in the dark, whether we’re ready to trust it or not, whatever appears at our fingertips is an important piece of the puzzle. An important part of how our life will fit together when all is said and done. Even if right now--with no larger picture available for reference--it just looks like an out-of-place, oddly shaped puzzle piece.

It’s the time of year when something ancient in us explores that interplay between darkness and light. The winter solstice sings songs to the longest night of the year while celebrating the coming return of longer days.

Collectively, western culture has portrayed this season not so much as a dance of dark and light, but as a reconsecration of the goodness of light which, in its everlasting glory, casts out dark.

In the white western imagination, dark and light have been typecast in limited roles, influencing the stories we tell ourselves about the world and each other.

Then, somehow, I remember. I look directly at the anxiety, the fear of not getting it right, and call Perfectionism by its name.

I feel the synthetic presence that had threatened to turn my insides to mass produced plastic leave my body. I feel relief like explant surgery. I can move around freely inside my inner world again, infused with curiosity and wonder, delighted to see what oddly shaped idea might emerge next.

Somehow, the naming of a thing creates a break in the barrier between what is and what could be. Whether we feel fully ready or not, that break sends new life flowing into our world to shake us up.