As we approach the longest dark of the year, the holy day called Winter Solstice, I cannot help but notice, each morning during my four-mile walk with puppy Scampi, that underneath the intense frequencies of this holiday season, with people I come across tending towards either joy (of being enveloped in the love of family, friends, no matter how near or far) or depression (from feeling unusually isolated, lonely, in comparison to others), I notice my own switching back and forth, between again, two opposites states.

But for me, these felt opposites lie at a subliminal level below conscious experience.

It’s as if there is a prevailing mood that drifts up from below, and infects my thinking process in one way or another. This mood is either dark, or it is light. The first immerses all my conscious thoughts (what I have to do today, what lies unfinished from yesterday) in usually, given my fiery nature, frustration or fury. The second immerses all my conscious thoughts in a spacious presence that easily and generously includes them all.

Yesterday, I was the grinch.

Today I felt like an angel.

What do “they” call this? Bi-polar disorder? But the highs for me, the lights, are not manic. In fact, anyone who is with me wouldn’t know which mood I was in, dark or light. My conscious thoughts and behavior are identical, either way.

Does this mean I’m masked?

I remember back in my 20s, being utterly obsessed with the phenomenon of masks. It began with my dreams, and spread into daily life. How everyone, everyone was wearing a mask! No one, no one was being real! How everyone was merely playing out a pre-set role, rather than expressing themselves authentically!

It was awful. I hated it.

Actually, I was talking about myself. This was the bare beginning of my glimpsing into the conditioning we females absorbed, growing up in ’50s America.

Now I can look back and see myself back then, as one of the proto-feminists: I kept all these feelings to myself, because no one would understand what I was talking about. Until that day when Nancy, one of my friends, sat with me at my kitchen table, and we both removed our masks! Thus began, I imagine at kitchen tables all over this land, the intense “feminist” conversations that ended up changing the world — and not necessarily for the better!

Long story, of course, all stories are, if you allow them to flow both backwards and forwards. Who knows when something — some quality, some decision, some action, actually begins? What’s the back story to that, whatever that is, because, as Wittgenstein said (and I paraphrase), “It’s hard to start at the beginning, and not go further back.”

So, what’s the beginning of this seemingly daily fluctuation between dark and light within myself that is occurring at precisely the lead up to the longest dark, shortest light of the year?

Who knows? All I can do is observe, hopefully in a detached manner, these seemingly inexorable complexities within my own being.