"Something both bleak and profoundly beautiful"

Enjoying the new Sting Christmas album, If on a Winter's Night...  From the liner notes:

The cold months of the northern hemisphere have been granted to us by the fortunate tilt of the earth on its axis, and they exercise a powerful influence on our collective psychology. They are part of the myth of ourselves we carry inside our heads, created as much in the shared landscape of the imagination as in the concrete reality of our surroundings.  Like all earthly creatures we seem pre-wired to recognize and respond to the polar archetypes of light and dark, of heat and cold, as they are encoded in the rhythm of the days and nights and the perpetual cycle of the seasons.

...There is something of the Winter that is primal, mysterious and utterly irreplaceable, something both bleak and profoundly beautiful, something essential to this myth of ourselves, to the story of our humanity, as if we somehow need the darkness of the
winter months to replenish our inner spirits as much as we need the light, energy and warmth of the summer.

It's easier for me to understand and accept so many things in life when I remember the promise of the seasons, the nighttime that will always turn to day; the inherent rhythm of things.  If there's a cycle all around us, we're just a part of it and, for me, thinking of life in that sense makes everything so much more manageable.