The Winter Solstice.
A time humans have been celebrating for thousands and thousands of years. The time of year when nights get their darkest and their longest. The time when things look and feel their bleakest.
You can call it Christmas, you can call it Hanukkah, you can call it Kwanzaa, you can call it the remnants of a pagan festival if you want to. But whatever you call it, the darkest days of the year bring out the human need to give, share, sing, gather, and generally light up the darkness in any way we can.
And there is a lot of darkness today. No doubt about it. We're in the midst of big changes -- religious, social, political, in consciousness -- and human beings tend to take change pretty hard. We don't tend to "go gentle into that good night," we tend to fear the worst and fall apart. We tend to go kicking and screaming into that good night, fiercely defending turf we don't need, can't use, and could have started sharing ages ago.
The only way to increase the amount of light we've got is to take some responsibility for the amount of darkness we produce.
To try to become aware of when we're merely projecting our own fears and inadequacies onto others. To try to figure out how much of the evil we see out in the world is actually coming from within our own hearts, our own actions, and our own attitudes.
The amount of human darkness increasingly exponentially around the world isn't coming from "them" -- it's coming from "us."
A good thing to ponder during the Winter Solstice.
