I’m revising The Light Returning for 2023, with brand new prompts, and in a new format on Thinkific.
This online course runs for the last ten days of the calendar year, and is meant to invite participants to reflect on and share their 2023 stories. The good ones and the bad ones, the soft and the hard ones. My hope is that this course will help weave a more complicated, nuanced, richly described tapestry of the year, one that we can look back on and find ourselves in, not as passive recipients of collective trauma but as people with hopes for ourselves and our communities, with skills to navigate hard times, and with agency.
If you participated in this course in 2020 or 2021, you know it is pretty low-key – there’s an optional virtual ‘opening ceremony’ on December 20, and an equally optional ‘closing ceremony’ at the end of the course. In the past, this course has been email-based, and participants received an email every morning. This year, I’m hosting it through Thinkific, and you’ll have access to all of the prompts when the content becomes available on December 21. You’ll maintain access to the content indefinitely, so you can work through it at whatever pace works for you.
We’ll have our own Discord server (available to participants) and I’ll be active in there throughout the course, so even though I won’t be in your inbox like I have been in previous years, I’ll still be around and reachable!
From the welcome section:
One goal of this course is to give participants a way to feel connected to community over a holiday season that, for some of us, can include tension, disconnection, and a feeling of alienation. This stretch of time between the solstice and the calendar year turning over can be a hard one. There are a lot of expectations, a lot of dominant discourses about family and what it means. There can be expectations about availability for in-person, indoor events that may exclude those of us who are still covid cautious. Some of us re-enter (by choice or not) a ‘closet’ during this season for our own safety or because our whole selves are not welcome. Some of us experience significant harm and hardship during this season. Even for those of us who are not experiencing distance from family for political and practical or pandemical reasons, this can be a hard season. Grief hits harder when the world is telling you you’re supposed to be celebrating. This course is meant to provide a counterweight to the heavy drag of those expectations and contexts.
Another goal of this course is to explicitly name collective grief, climate crisis, and colonial violence as core parts of 2023. This is important to me because 2023 has not just been about individual struggle, but it has felt increasingly individualized. How can we bring a sense of collectivity into our 2023 stories?
A third goal of this course is to not only welcome the light back, but to actively turn towards the light – to be phototropic [1] in our own lives.
In this third goal, we don’t just “focus on the positive” to the exclusion of naming and honouring what has hurt, what has been unjust, what has been unbearable. But I do want to suggest that how we tell our stories influences how possible it feels to live our lives.
My hope for us is that we can begin to uncover and give language to the legacies of action we have joined in this last year, the contributions we have made to the lives of others, the care and connections that have kept us tethered to our hopes, our dreams, our lives.
In turning toward the light, I also want to invite course participants to stand against the stories that so many of us have been told about ourselves that do not offer a sense of possibility or hope. I want us to wrestle those stories back from the racist, ableist, cis-hetero-patriarchal capitalism that has attempted to steal them from us.
These are our stories.
They are so much more rich and complex than the thin stories handed to us by people who do not value our lives.
[1] Phototropism is the response of a plant or other organism to light, most often seen in plants turning towards the source of light in order to sustain themselves. I love this metaphor for so many reasons, and in my own life it has been helpful to think of all the many times I have turned toward the light in order to sustain myself – holding onto my values as a source of light, holding onto my hopes as a source of light, reaching out to my community (sometimes only in my own thoughts, but still turning towards them). Like that meme says, “you’re basically a houseplant with complicated emotions” – I find this so heartening.
The cost is sliding scale, from $10-50.
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