To Grow in the Dark

A meditation on survival, perception, and the softest kind of strength.

“Flowers are a bit like soldiers - fighting for survival.”

Someone said that to me during one of those meandering, late-morning conversations over coffee. The kind that drifts in and out of silence without apology. But the words stayed with me.

We often associate beauty with ease, with grace, with effortlessness.

But the very things we admire in a flower - its vibrant colour, its fragrance, its delicate shape - aren’t incidental. They are strategies. Tools. The armour and lure of survival.

Beauty, then, may not be softness. It may be strength in another form.

And once you see that - once you really see it - it changes the way you look at everything.

The very things that have made something struggle also make it beautiful, distinctive, memorable.

What makes something special may actually be its scar tissue - the mark of what it’s lived through.

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Lately, I’ve been listening to Tamino’s Every Dawn’s a Mountain. In the track “Willow,” a tree becomes more than a tree. It becomes a stand-in for emotional endurance, for quiet strength.

“Left me in the dark to grow.”

There’s something profound in that line. It speaks to the kind of growth that happens out of sight, under pressure. The kind that’s not ornamental or visible - but real. A kind of survival that doesn’t require applause.

Willows thrive in the damp, in the shadows. They bend, but don’t break. They grow without sunlight, without spectacle. There’s a lesson there about the resilience that hides in softness. About what it means to go on, quietly.

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C.S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, wrote:

“The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”

And later:

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

That last line. I think about it often - how grief doesn’t announce itself after a while. It just settles into the fabric of things. It becomes part of the landscape.

You don’t move past it. You move with it. And over time, you begin to see through it - like light filtered through water. Distorted, but not diminished.

There’s something oddly beautiful about that, too.
How pain, instead of canceling happiness, can sit beside it.
How loss, instead of erasing love, can clarify it.

That last line speaks to a feeling I have - that grief has forever changed things for me. I carry it with me every day, but alongside that, there’s a different kind of experience and way of seeing that has altered me and brought about something amazing at the same time.

Pain and happiness can coexist.

Beauty and struggle are inextricably linked.

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What if looking differently is the first act of healing?
What if the ordinary - the overcast sky, the silence that lingers after laughter, the crease in your bedsheets - is hiding something extraordinary, if we’re willing to look twice?

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✶ Prompt

Practice re-looking at things in your daily life.
A place that feels ordinary.

Things you see every day and don’t think twice about.

Can you flip your view?

What if the dull is actually sacred?
What if contradiction is the point?

You don’t need a new world.

Just a new way of looking.

Did this resonate? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Katie <3