The Darkest Days of the Year

The days of December, especially those before December 21st, are the shortest days of the year; the nights leading up to the Winter Solstice, the darkest.

For those of us who are circadian rhythm- and/or serotonin level-sensitive to the absence or presence of natural light, the winter holiday season can be tricky to negotiate. Just when everyone else seems to be cheery and festive, we descend into a funk. Socializing becomes agonizing, and our energy becomes extinct.

This is especially distressing for me because my birthday is in early December. As the date approaches, family and friends will ask optimistically: "What are your plans for your birthday? How are you going to celebrate?"

"Celebrate?" I want to growl. " I just want to slumber! Why do we always have to celebrate?"


Before I learned about SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) I thought I was just a bear hiding out in a human body. Why, I would wonder, do I want to hibernate from Halloween through March?  Why do I become apathetic, fatigued, irritable, lethargic, and just downright anti-social when everyone else is kicking into high-gear?

According to Dr. Richard Friedman, author of an article on SAD in today's New York Times: "As daylight wanes, millions begin to feel depressed, sluggish and socially withdrawn. They also tend to sleep more, eat more and have less sex. By spring or summer the symptoms abate, only to return the next autumn."

Traditionally, SAD has been treated with psychotherapy and/or antidepressants, or a wait-it-out-until- spring "white knuckling." But there are alternative therapies that work as well.

If you struggle with SAD, you do not  have to wait for spring and summer to feel better. “Bright light in the early morning is a powerful, fast and effective treatment for seasonal depression,” said Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal,  a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Georgetown Medical School and author of “Winter Blues” (Guilford, 1998). “Light is a nutrient of sorts for these patients.”

According to Michael Terman, director of the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at the Columbia University Medical School, people are most responsive to light therapy early in the morning, just when melatonin secretion begins to wane, about eight to nine hours after the nighttime surge begins.

If SAD sends you spiraling into the winter doldrums, try some of the following techniques:

Extend each day through the use of artificial sunlight. The standard course is 30 minutes of fluorescent soft-white light at 10,000 lux a day. (Shop for full-spectrum lights.) According to Dr. Friedman, the effects of light therapy are fast, usually four to seven days, compared with antidepressants which can take four to six weeks to work.

Use artificial bedroom lights. These help people who are suffering with insomnia and severe depression. Commercially available, these lights are set to simulate dawn, automatically going from dim lighting to bright, white light every morning.

Sit near a window. Move yourself close to a window and look outside for 15-minutes at a time, 3-times daily. You could sit near the window that gets the brightest  morning light while you eat breakfast, write out your to-do list, or read the morning paper.  If you work in an office, you could ask for your desk to face a window. If you work at home, you have many opportunities to "follow the sun."


(If you want to understand the concept of following the sun, just watch an in-door cat for a full day.
A cat will always find the spot on the rug where there is a circle of sun, and there you will find her until the sun moves. That's her sign to get up, stretch, and move to the next sun splotch.)


Spend at least one hour outdoors each day. Try to get in an half-an-hour in the early morning, and another half-an-hour in the early afternoon. This remedy is worth getting up an hour earlier.

Don't isolate from your family and friends. Pace yourself. Perhaps you won't accept all invitations this holiday season, but you'll be up for some. Try scheduling outdoor activities in the mid-day, and increase physical activities like walking, cross-country skiing, and skating. Invite your loved ones to join you.

Try not to get discouraged. Remember, after the winter solstice, each day gets a bit longer until the summer solstice in mid-June, when we celebrate the longest day of the year.

It's all cyclical.

Counting My Blessings

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. --Melody Beattie

I am not one who takes her inspiration from one-hour television dramas; but two years ago, it was a rerun of ER which lit my dark path through to the next phase of my life.

I was facing my first Thanksgiving without Chaz, who had walked away from our marriage three months earlier. I was still in shock: depressed, despondent, and discombobulated. We had started negotiating around the communal property of the marriage that once had held our dreams but now lay in shambles, and things were not looking good.

We had agreed not to hire lawyers and litigate, but rather we chose to mediate our divorce, a fitting choice for two people who had met and fallen in love while serving as community mediators in San Francisco fifteen years earlier.

At the start of the process, a friend warned me: “Marriage is about love; divorce is about money. Get a lawyer.”  Everyone said: “Get a good lawyer.”

I said no. I didn’t want to participate in a hostile divorce. I wanted a “spiritual divorce” as spelled out by Debbie Ford, author a book of the same name. I wanted to walk resolutely through the fire of anger, grief, acceptance, and onto gratitude and liberation.

“You what?” my friends exclaimed.  “You know YaYa,” chuckled one of my closest confreres, Father Charles. “She’s always got to be so spiritual,” he laughed. (And this, from a priest!)

One meeting into the mediation process and it was clear Chaz was going for the jugular. California divorce law allows for the 50-50 split of communal property. Chaz wanted half of my retirement, half of our savings, half of my TSA (a tax deferred account), alimony, and he even pursued stocks that I had brought into our marriage, but never commingled.


Was I naïve? Was I crazy? Should I fight? Should I fold? Can I trust my own counsel? Should I follow my heart? Damn, trust my heart? Look at where my heart had brought me thus far.

Then, one afternoon, submerged in my funk, I was mindlessly flipping through television channels, only pausing long enough on each station to determine that its contents was of no interest to me, when I chanced upon a scene at the end of this particular ER program.

Two doctors, (I don’t even know the characters names) are sitting on a bench outside of the hospital. The two have been discussing what I can only guess was some type of trauma that one of the doctors had experienced, when the consoling member of the pair asked: “What if this didn’t happen to you, but, it happened for you?”

The experience of hearing those few words was like sitting in the optometrist’s chair as she slips different lens in and out of the heavy frame, trying to decipher exactly what is the proper prescription for your particularly challenged sight.

“No, this one is fuzzier than the last one.”
“Yes, this one is a little clearer.”
“No, this one is not quite as sharp.”
“Wait! Wait a minute! Now I can see clearly!”


A number of years earlier, I had entered therapy during a crisis in my personal life. My loving, kind, maternal therapist told me, after only one session: “You, my dear, are entering a phase of life I like to call ‘re-membering.’ You are about to go in search of, find, and re-member parts of your lost self. When you finish, you may not recognize the person you have become."


With a slight shift of my lens, I saw that this divorce experience was just one piece, albeit one very painful piece, of a much larger picture of my life. I had to trust the invisible hand that was rearranging the pieces. I was called to endure the dismemberment of this aspect of my life in order to create a more whole soul.

As I sit here on the eve of this Thanksgiving holiday, counting my blessings, I realize the need to be thankful for the trials and tribulations of life. They, too, can be transformed into blessings. “…for count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing this, that the testing of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, lacking nothing." --James 1:2-3

Chaz did receive 50% of the communal property, and he was awarded an alimony allotment, though it was for much less than he originally asked.

I have just finished paying the first year of alimony and I’m grateful I have been able to do so without extreme financial hardship. I am thankful for all of the support of my family and friends during the past two years. I am eternally grateful for the new me I am becoming, and for the gift of a new, precious love.

But most of all, I am thankful for the certain assurance that the Goddess Will Provide!


Gratitude ... goes beyond the "mine" and "thine" and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy. --Henri J. M. Nouwen

Staying Awake in the Moment

" The secret of beginning a life of deep awareness and sensitivity lies in our willingness to pay attention. Our growth as conscious, awake human beings is marked not so much by grand gestures and visible renunciations as by extending loving attention to the minutest particulars of our lives.

"Every relationship, every thought, every gesture is blessed with meaning through the wholehearted attention we bring to it. In the complexities of our minds and lives we easily forget the power of attention, yet without attention we live only on the surface of existence.

"It is just simple attention that allows us truly to listen to the song of a bird, to see deeply the glory of an autumn leaf, to touch the heart of another and be touched. We need to be fully present in order to love a single thing wholeheartedly. We need to be fully awake in this moment if we are to receive and respond to the learning inherent in it."

    -   Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield, Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart

Hail to the Chief

Have you ever taken one of those endless personality tests that asks:

Q: If you were a cat with nine lives, what would you do with the other eight?
Q: If you won three million dollars in a lottery, what would you do with the last million?
Q: If you had a theme song that played every time you entered and exited a room, what would it be?  (Lately, I’ve been mentally gliding through space on Jill Scott’s “Living My Life Like It's Golden.”)

Well, as of January 20, 2009, when he is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama will have Thee Theme Song, the presidential anthem: “Hail to the Chief.” This song will accompany him at almost every public appearance for the next four years. That’s mind-blowing!

The melody itself is majestic, but the words are rarely sung.
Oh, would I like to hear them sung on that historic day!

    Hail to the Chief we have chosen for the nation,
    Hail to the Chief! We salute him, one and all.
    Hail to the Chief, as we pledge cooperation
    In proud fulfillment of a great, noble call.

    Yours is the aim to make this grand country grander,
    This you will do, that's our strong, firm belief.
    Hail to the one we selected as commander,
    Hail to the President! Hail to the Chief!

(The lyrics were written by Albert Gamse and set to James Sanderson's music.)