31. qarrtsiluni

sitting together in the dark: seedlings of a new offering

The first time I heard the word qarrtsiluni (kʌːrʒ.sɪ.luːnɪ / kartz-sih-loo-nih)—the Inuit word for sitting together in darkness, waiting for something to emerge—it touched the most tender part of me.

Traditionally, it described the ritual of hunters gathering in a darkened house, sitting in silence, waiting for inspiration to stream into their collective consciousness before composing new songs to honor the whale. It is a word for deep listening, for attunement to what is emerging, for the space before something takes form.

If I could choose one word for this moment we are living through, it would be this one.

It is undoubtedly clear that we are living through dark times. Truth itself erodes like sand slipping through our fingers. The sheer velocity of devastation is overwhelming, like trying to hold back a tidal wave with bare hands. Francis Weller, a beloved teacher known for his teachings on grief, often uses the word qarrtsiluni to help us name where we are. He calls this “the long dark”—an era of unraveling, endings and transformation that will last many generations.

Qarrtsiluni is this, too—this moment of darkness, of deep listening, of sitting with what is ending and what has not yet begun. A collective in-between, a time of not knowing, of waiting for what comes next.

Because even as fires—both literal and metaphorical—rage around us and the systems we once leaned on falter under the strain, we are still here. We are living in a time of profound unknowing. It feels like we are standing at the edge of something vast, looking out into an expanse we cannot fully see or understand. The uncertainty is disorienting, but I also believe it carries a quiet invitation—to surrender, slow down, listen, and simply be with what is. Winter teaches us this—the stillness, the slowing, the resting. A time to honour the unseen and the unformed, to trust in what lies beneath the surface, even when we cannot see it.

But oh, how we resist this place. How we are hardwired to want to fix, to resolve, to know. We rush through transitions, grief, and the discomfort of not having an answer.

But what if we didn’t?

What if we could stay with what is?

It is difficult to fully tend to what is unfolding if we are still in denial about the depths of this darkness. To acknowledge the shadow, to name the collapse, is its own kind of reckoning—a necessary loss of innocence. Innocence, when unexamined, can keep us from seeing clearly. Qarrtsiluni is not just waiting in the dark—it is waiting with the dark. It requires a willingness to name it, to sit with it, to acknowledge that while we do not yet know what comes next, something is forming in its depths nonetheless. So many of us are here, in this liminal space—between what was and what will be, between loss and renewal, between old ways of being and what is quietly taking shape. But to sit in the dark requires not only courage but also context. To understand where we are, we must first understand how we got here.

Thinkers like Margaret Wheatley have helped me contextualize this moment; her work has long explored societal collapse, leadership, and transformation in times of upheaval, asking how we find meaning and purpose amid great change. Her book, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, builds on these themes, drawing on historical frameworks—such as Sir John Glubb’s study of collapsing civilizations—to help us understand where we are now and what kind of leadership is required in this era of decline.

According to Glubb, civilisational collapse takes about 250 years, about ten generations. The final stage—the Age of Decadence—is marked by wealth and power giving way to narcissism, consumerism, nihilism, and fanaticism. It is an era where celebrity culture flourishes, distractions take precedence over meaning, and the illusion of prosperity masks the inevitable collapse beneath it. This framework is so very bittersweet. We are not in a temporary crisis but in an epochal shift, and somehow, this is what we humans replicate, no matter how time has passed or how we think we have come.

Reckoning with this truth has also been profoundly isolating. Because despite the signs being everywhere—in the destabilization of our climate, in the breakdown of trust, in the normalization of violence—so few are willing to acknowledge it.

But the grief of collapse, ecological destruction, and failing systems does not land evenly. I feel like it’s also crucial for us to remember that we are not in just any in-between but a moment shaped by history, the realities of the Global North, and living in relative abundance amidst decline. Because for many, collapse is already lived, already embodied. In Palestine, in Congo, in Sudan, in the sinking islands of the Pacific, in communities on the frontlines of climate crisis and imperial violence—it is not theoretical, but daily survival.

For those of us who remain for the moment in relative safety, this reckoning carries a weight of responsibility—a need to confront not only what is being lost but also our complicity in the systems that created this harm. It is not just grief for what is being lost but the deeper, more painful grief of confronting our entanglement—our place within the very systems that have caused so much harm. How do we reconcile that? How do we metabolise that grief, not into paralysis, but into something generative, something meaningful?

These questions have been my compass, and over the past five years, I have immersed myself in deep study in various methodologies and healing arts, trying to understand, navigate, and contribute meaningfully during this tender phase of our world’s evolution.

Most recently, I have been training as an intuitive somatic, body-oriented coach. I am also in an ongoing apprenticeship in grief and tending, building on earlier foundations in transpersonal and process-oriented psychology. Both of these learning experiences—one rooted in the body's intelligence, the other in the necessity of tending to grief in community, alongside the many beautiful and generous teachers I have been lucky to learn from—have been shaping how I want to show up in the world.

I want to be a better doula for my fellow earthlings—to the violence, chaos, and stillness that accompany birth and death, beginnings and endings that are often happening at the same time. I need to tend to what is dying to tend to what is being born. A dear soul-friend recently helped me name something I have long felt but struggled to articulate—that the grief of staying with the dark in this time is a kind of de-growth practice. A practice of stripping away illusions, stepping out of the myth of endless progress, and confronting the uncomfortable truth that things are not going to ‘get better’ in the way we were promised. It is a practice of being with what is dying—not to fix or save it, but to learn how to meet it with presence and care.

Many indigenous teachings remind us that our greatest medicine is hidden in our deepest wound. Grief has been mine. Alongside my own grief—the loss of my father, the slow unraveling of the world as I knew it—I have been reckoning with a much larger grief. The grief of the earth. The grief of our ancestors. The grief that lingers in our bones, unprocessed, passed down through generations. But grief is not only about death. As Francis Weller teaches, grief is about loss in many forms. It is the loss of places, relationships, identities and ways of life. It is the grief of ecological destruction, cultural erasure, exile, and the futures we imagined but will never live. Grief is woven into the fabric of being alive—the inevitable shadow of love, change, and time itself.

And grief does not only manifest as sadness. It shows up in anger, in numbness, in exhaustion. It appears as cynicism, as restlessness, as the inability to focus. It emerges in disassociation, in feeling unworthy of love, in the desperate need to keep moving, keep doing, to avoid the stillness where grief might catch up to us. We live in a world that does not know how to tend to grief, so instead, we suppress it, we medicalise it, we pathologise it—until it festers in ways we do not always recognise.

Unprocessed grief turns into destruction. We see it everywhere—in the depraved, morally bankrupt leaders who do not just act without care but actively perpetuate harm, cruelty, and devastation; in the violence that erupts from wounds left untended; in the disconnection that fuels endless cycles of extraction and exploitation.

Working with both our grief and our soma (soma meaning the living, sensing body—our whole embodied experience, not just our physical form) asks something similar of us—to stay with what is present. To not bypass. To not rush to fix or explain but to feel. They remind us that what is unacknowledged does not disappear; it lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the quiet spaces we don’t always know how to name and by finding a way to be with what’s there can be a portal to accessing our greatest joy, love, and aliveness.

All this to say, I wanted to share that while I complete my training hours towards my accreditation, I am now slowly starting to offer a handful of pay-what-you-feel one-to-one sessions for paid subscribers of this newsletter. These sessions are for me to explore what this work is, what to call it, how to integrate and practice what I’ve been learning, how best to support others in transition and how to make this my own. I also see this offering as an extension of the tender contributions universe I’ve been slowly cultivating here.

These sessions are not about fixing or achieving. They are about honoring. About becoming. I want to cultivate a space to meet in the in-between, to listen deeply, and to explore the many transitions you may be navigating. I’ve come to realize that simply sitting together is where healing begins. Unlike traditional coaching, which often focuses on performance and moving from A to B, I see this work as more akin to guiding—holding space for transformation rather than forcing it. It is about deep presence, about allowing what needs to unfold to do so in its own time. More often than not, these sessions are reciprocal—I, too, am deeply nourished by this work, impacted by the healing that takes place in shared presence.

In a time when so many of us feel disconnected and dissociated—when we have spent years absorbing fear, numbing ourselves, and tuning out—I want to create a space where we can reconnect and remember the wisdom we hold within. This practice is, in many ways, my own invitation into qarrtsiluni: to sit together in and with the darkness, to see what emerges, and to gently tap into the resources that already live within us.

As spring rears its head through the tender unfurling of new life, these words—like the first ephemeral blooms pushing through the remnants of winter—are seeds of a new beginning. I scatter them into the unknown, trusting that, like all things in nature, they will take root in their own time, threading through the decay of what was and rising into something new and beautiful.

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