From Next Avenue.org, an interesting viewpoint on the dark, short days of winter by designer and writer Akiko Busch.

My favorite passages:

Grasping Jung’s belief that the seed of creativity was found in the shadows, she welcomes the interior voyages into the far recesses of the psyche that one embarks on naturally when the light fades. The twilight days of December grant permission for a frolic in the subconscious.

To these people, there is nothing oppressive about nighttime. They face the season not by strategizing around it — that is, not looking for ways to mitigate the loss of light or minimizing the depression that so often follows — but by recognizing that human experience can benefit from being “in the dark.”

Perhaps, then, it is enough to know that these short, dark days can simply serve as a kind of designated zone for creative and self-searching, a grand pause offered to us by the natural motion of the planets.

The ephemeral seasonal darkness is something we can respond to with a greater degree of individual choice. For some of us, it may be of profound influence for two or three weeks; for others, 10 or 12. Whatever its duration, it is a time that allows us to wander within, an occasion to become reacquainted with ourselves and to fine-tune the mechanics of our own beings before the light returns and we step outside again.