I first came across Mary Oliver’s ‘Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness’ in the wake of my mother’s death. My wonderful friend Emily had given me the collection ‘A Thousand Mornings’ as a birthday present, and I opened the book on the tube, read this poem and started openly weeping. I didn’t know it at the time, but in this moment I was already pregnant with my son.

A year later, I read the poem at the ‘welcome party’ we held in lieu of a christening, giving a long preamble to explain why I had chosen such a seemingly morbid poem for such a happy occasion. (I did leave out the last few lines, because it seemed a little inauspicious to welcome my son into the world with a reading that ended with the word ‘doomed’.)

In particular, Mary’s observation that “the vivacity of what was is married to the vitality of what will be” spoke to me of the natural cycle of death and renewal, and of the ways in which my mother’s life and spirit continued in my son – even as I had to face my sadness that she could not be with him in person. Reading this poem was a way for me to honour both her presence and her absence.

Looking back, it seems strange to me that Emily just happened to give me this book at this particular point in time – we did not normally exchange birthday presents – and that I happened to open it at this particular page. But I suppose life is like that sometimes. It gives us what we need even before we have realised that we need it.

So it was with another poem that brought me to tears the first time I encountered it: Mark Nepo’s ‘Adrift’, to which I was introduced by Tara Brach’s podcast during the lockdown of spring 2020.

It was one of the rare occasions when I took my daily walk by myself in the evening, rather than during the day with my son. I put my headphones in and strode down to the local park, seeking solace from Tara’s words as I so often did. When I heard her read this poem, it stopped me in my tracks. I looked at the trees around me, the sky above, the birds. I looked at the empty space where other humans should be, and I started to cry.

Suddenly I was forcibly struck, as I think many of us were during lockdown, by the way that life in the natural world went on largely as normal, even as the human world was simultaneously paralysed and thrown into violent convulsions.

Time had stopped, but time also flowed on: the blossoming trees and my growing son were living proof of it. The latter – who was one year old at the time, and changing so rapidly, learning to walk and talk and doing new things every day – was a constant reminder that we do not exist in splendid isolation from this natural flow, but are ourselves a part of it.

There is so much in this poem – far too much for me to do justice to here – but I think really it is all contained in the raw simplicity of the opening and closing lines, which are the ones that lodged themselves in my heart: “Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.”

I started playing Einaudi’s piano music in the early days of my long covid, I suppose for the same reason he is so popular with amateur pianists everywhere: it was easy enough to be manageable for my befogged brain, but expressive enough to give me something I needed.

I first began playing this particular piece last year, at a time when I was processing various forms of grief – including the premature death of a friend, and the gradual acceptance that the life I had before getting long covid was irrevocably gone.

Light and darkness is a theme I’ve been reflecting on a lot these past few years. More and more, I realise that the light and the darkness in our lives are really two sides of the same coin. There is no grief without love, no joy without sadness, no growth without pain. As usual, Ursula K Le Guin put it better than I ever could when she wrote that “light is the left hand of darkness”.

Le Guin was deeply influenced by Taoism. She carried the wisdom – shared by many Eastern traditions, including Buddhism – that concepts which we might be tempted to set in binary opposition to one another are in fact intertwined and interdependent. I like the fact that this piece is called “Ombre”, or “Shadow”, because it helps me to inhabit and grapple with these shades of grey.

I like the unexpected final chord – which, perhaps surprisingly given its name, contains the only black key played in the entire piece. It reminds me that in life there is rarely a neat resolution – that, as Eckhart Tolle puts it, “most stories don’t ever really work themselves out”. It helps me connect to a sense of hope that is about more than just holding out for a happy ending.

I find that the idea of shadows also helps me to think about how to relate to the political darkness all around us. I’m playing with the idea that we can think of this darkness as shadows cast by the light. That the reason we feel the suffering of war, planetary destruction, poverty and oppression so acutely is that we know instinctively they aren’t all there is. We know, deep in our hearts, that we are more than this. That we are capable of living differently.

I recorded these readings and this rendition last October. I never shared them at the time, because I knew there were words I wanted to accompany them, and I didn’t have the energy to write them. These aren’t the words I would have written then, but I think they probably say much the same thing.

I never intended for this to be a Christmas message. These works spoke to me more of autumn, with its falling leaves and lengthening shadows. We are past the solstice now, no longer in “the days of growing darkness”, at least not literally. But as so often these days, it has taken me longer to finish this piece than I expected – and I’ve decided that its sentiments are as appropriate now as ever.

Christmas – whether we look at its pagan origins or the Christian story laid over them – is all about finding light in the midst of darkness. There is a reason, after all, that we celebrate it in the middle of winter. For me, there’s something about this time of year that invites us to contemplate Valerie Kaur’s question about the state of the world: “What if this isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?”

This year especially, I’m taking inspiration from those who have kept the flame of hope alive during times every bit as dark as those we face today. No matter how bleak the circumstances, there is always light, there is always goodness, and there is always something we can build together. Perhaps the things we need to build to help ourselves and others survive the storm to come may yet prove to be the foundations for better days beyond it.

I say “better days” and not “a better world” because I’m not sure I believe in utopias any more. I don’t think there is a perfect world out there where human and animal suffering is abolished. I don’t think that whatever we build next will be exempt from the cycle of disintegration and renewal. But I do believe that it is still worth building.

Long covid has made me more aware of my own cycles of energy and exhaustion, of optimism and despair. Paradoxically, I find that the more I’m able to accept and embrace the existence of these cycles, the less I am beholden to them.

I can watch my rising optimism – the inevitable thought “perhaps I’m cured?” that follows a few good days – without getting totally carried away by it. I can be with my falling energy levels – the foggy brain, the aching limbs – without buying into the equally inevitable thought that I’ll be sick forever.

Perhaps this is what’s required of all of us in these unstable times. Perhaps we need to learn to relate this way to political cycles – to break free of oscillating between the feeling that salvation is just around the corner and the feeling that all is lost. To find some sense of balance and equilibrium in the midst of it all, as the winds change and things fall apart around us. To sustain our hope and courage during the long winters, to lay down stores and put down roots, so there is something ready and waiting to grow when spring comes again.

In his book ‘Into the Foothills of Transformation’, the Methodist minister Donald Eadie – whose loss we have also mourned these past years – speaks of finding comfort in a community of chronic illness sufferers called The Pain and Hope Group. I wonder if this is really what learning to live is all about – pain and hope – and if it must ultimately be a collective rather than simply an individual endeavour.

We need to ground ourselves in the light, not as a way to avoid or deny the reality of the darkness, but precisely to give us the strength and the bravery to face it fully. We need to hold on to the knowledge that, in Mary Oliver’s words, the world inevitably and repeatedly “descends into a rich mash in order that it may resume”. We need to be able to say, as Mark Nepo does: “I am so sad, and everything is beautiful.”