It’s pitch black in the mornings, and the evenings pool into indigo while the kids are still dangling from the monkey bars.

It brings up a primordial panic.

Is the light gone forever?  Is joy ebbing away?

There’s grief and fear wherever you look.  Maybe it’s in the news, or maybe it’s closer to home.   A brutal attack.  An old sorrow.  A friend’s crisis.  An impossible loss.  A betrayal.  A stinging disappointment.

If you’re in grief, despair, or even just frustrated to distraction, nothing is more maddening than being told to ‘look on the bright side,’ ‘focus on the positive,’ or– most hideous of all nefarious self-help bungles — being asked, “So what’s perfect about that?”

Shudder.

Pause.

And yet, and yet, and yet.  Darkness is not the only reality.  When we live as though sorrow and violence are the only thing true about the world, we rob ourselves of our great human power.

Our love, our joy, our delight, our compassion– these are reality too.  They might even be the most real thing of all.  The inscrutable Byron Katie would say that violence and hatred is “just Love having a nightmare.”

Of course, when you’re in a nightmare, it feels very, very real.

The other night I watched my little girl have a fever-induced nightmare.  She thrashed and muttered, making her way through the brambles of her own consciousness.  I could see that she was perfectly safe, even as she flailed her little arms against imaginary adversaries.

And I thought of something my coach had said to me a few days earlier.  She was giving me a mantra of sorts.

“I am strong because I am awake.”  

If you’re reading this, you’re awake too.  I believe the world needs us to be awake.  To remember that darkness is but a season.  And to light the lights.

Whether you light a Christmas tree, or a menorah, or the bonfire of solstice, or plain old heathen candles, you join that throng of people throughout history who saw the dark and met it with hope.

There’s a song that sums up everything I want you to hear today.  I shunned it for years because it reminded me of the religious context in which I first heard it, but as I shed old skins, I’m reclaiming old treasures, too.

It’s a song by David Wilcox.  Here’s a line from it:

In this scene set in shadow, like the night is here to stay
though there is evil cast around us, it was love who wrote the play.

Go watch him sing it HERE.

And light your lights.