It is the day of the winter solstice, the moment when Earth’s polar tilt is farthest from the sun. Even though this day marks the start of winter, we know that, tomorrow, the days will start to become lighter. The solstice reminds us that light and dark also balance and shift on the Earth and in our own lives.

Sorrow and joy whip our hearts back and forth. Just when you’ve gotten settled in a nice, comfy place, life plucks you up and pitches you somewhere else not nearly as amenable. The way to survive and hold onto the best in the worst of times is to look for beauty in ugliness and sadness—and recognize that seeds of loss sprout below the surface of beauty and joy.

If I can manage that balance, then the complexity of life and the vast reserves of the heart open up and I become part of something vast and changing, as well as something fixed and secure. I can begin to see a wounded place as a hub of contradictions, paradoxes, and disjunctions and recognize that it is like my own human self: capable of being helpful, generous, greedy, judgmental, brave, nurturing, aching, happy, loyal, miserly, charming, afraid, and a pain in the ass—all within the course of a day. I also become aware of how the beautiful and “pristine” is not entirely so. Even protected wilderness areas harbor fungus, animal bodies not entirely eaten and left to rot, the temporality of each being in each moment.

If I can acknowledge these opposites on flattened mountaintops, clear-cut forests, and communities suffocating under the fumes of the petrochemical industry, I can also accept opposites in other people, myself, and circumstances. The wondrous can splinter sorrow at any time. If I can peer at the discrepancies, I broaden my consciousness, brave the contraries, and partner with the troubling contraries of life.

(Excerpted from Trebbe Johnson, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken Places)