The dark season was never meant to be substituted / Data collected from a nervous system that lived in the year 2025 //

“Each Monday morning, fellows gather for SEED SOURCING: a shared "storytelling" practice. In the fictional, parallel plane of this story-space, the familiar social and physical laws are suspended. Each fellow is invited to speak from the most direct contact with their inner world - offering story, vision, image, or language that arises from the deeper current beneath surface experience. The practice is oriented toward the sourcing of the seed: that initial pulse of freedom, imagination, desire and possibility from which creation emerges.”

1 // The dark season was never meant to be substituted.

It was meant to be dark.
To slow the pulse of the land and the body.
To teach us how to rest, how to die.

But we string light across it.
We cover the long nights in blinking reassurance
proof that we are still awake,
still productive,
still performing.

Christmas lights flicker like a nervous system that cannot settle.
Rhythms pulled off course.
Bodies wired for cycles, confused.
This is the weight of chronic stimulation on our ecosystem.

I wonder what this season would look like,
what this culture would look like,
if we didn’t cover it entirely in Christmas lights.
If we’d let the dark brace us.

If there were only the light of fire.
The light of dawn and day.

They are restorative enough.
Winter is not to be skipped.
It pulls life inward so that something essential can be restored.

“Partnering is a vow to shape life alongside one another.” ( Eli wrote this line and I love it )

What would it mean
to shape life alongside winter?
Not as something to endure or decorate over,
but as a collaborator in our becoming.

Letting the quiet be enough.
Trusting that not everything
needs illumination to be alive.
That some things need darkness
to remember who they are.


2 // Data collected from a nervous system that lived in the year 2025:

I plug in the lights
for safekeeping.
I unplug from my body,
close my inner eye.
I eat when I’m not hungry
and stay awake when I’m tired.
I stay busy enough,
buy too much,
exaggerate —
not to feel the quiet.

I mistake overwhelm
for aliveness.
I substitute light for warmth,
noise for rest,
motion for meaning.

Substitute.
Substitute