Darkness Retreats

Today marks the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Over the past few days there has been no light here, cloudy, foggy, and raining, it is as it should be.

Somehow these dark days feel right. Tomorrow things will be different. The day will be longer than today, and each one after longer than before. Eventually things will grow again.

I welcome the short days as a time to slow down, as much of a hibernation as the modern world will allow. As others scurry about, preparing for the holidays, in what seems an effort to banish these days, I try to embrace them. I have always felt that one has the embrace the dark as well as the light.

One must pay homage to the dark in order to keep it from growing wildly as a neglected garden will. To keep the pansies and sweet potato vine from overgrowing the magnolia and asters, they must have attention. They must be cultivated, watered, fed, and yes, trained. Ultimately the dark complimenting the light, each making the other more beautiful.

Now things will change, I will look to the light. Through the bright winter days when the sun shines so intensely on the bare ground reminding me the corner is turned and brightness is returning. Through the first days of warmth when things struggle up through the soil only to be cruelly reduced to brown again by the brief return of cold.

It is from down on, I do know that the darkness will end, for a little while.