It only takes a spark to pierce the darkness.

Milton Erikson, one of the most gifted psychotherapists, was once asked to visit a woman who had retreated almost entirely from life. She lived alone in a large mansion in Milwaukee. Deeply depressed, wheelchair-bound, she kept the curtains drawn at all hours. Her only contact with the outside world was an occasional visit to church. By every psychological and physical measure, she had disappeared into darkness.

When Erikson arrived at her home, he noticed on the windowsill, a single gap in blinds. It allowed a narrow beam of light to fall, on a small pot of African violets.

Erikson did not try to fix her. He simply worked with what was already there. That small, stubborn insistence on life in the middle of the darkness.

He encouraged her to take cuttings. To grow more plants. And eventually, to bring them as gifts to the people in her church. She gave them to the bereaved, the newborn, the married, the ill. Her violets became a way of reaching out, of feeling useful, of belonging.

It was a spark in the darkness. It changed everything. When she died, her obituary described her as the African Violet Queen of Milwaukee, a woman who had touched thousands of lives with kindness.

I think about this story often when I sit with women who feel as though their light has gone out.

Years of masking, of adjusting who we are, of becoming who we are told to be. By midlife, many of us have become so skilled at functioning behind a shiny facade. The depression, the exhaustion, the sense that something is missing, the feeling of failure and the shame of self-abandonment.

Erikson teaches us something I have come to believe deeply. Spirit never goes away. It may be hidden behind years of shame, diagnoses, grief, regret or just the accumulated weight of what life has thrown at us. Igniting that vital spark might be as simple as a book you keep meaning to read. A walk you have longed to take. A picture you dream of painting. Something that lights something up inside you despite everything. Like the violets on the window sill. This is the beginning. It gives direction and you don't need to see the whole path. You don't need to have it figured out. For now just tend to the spark. Something inside of you already knows the way.