Circles and Cycles, Light Vs. Dark… and The Biggest Picture

Every year is a circle around the sun.  Every year our homes grow cold….only to slowly warm again. Every year the trees go bare, only to be replaced eventually by the budding of new life.

Every year the earth plunges into darkness…only to emerge back into the light.

………………………..…………………….

It is our most basic cycle, and a reminder of the greater cycles, on grander scales, that we all pass through in our lives. And on grander scales too, some larger than our little lifespans, there are cycles of light and darkness. The waxing and waning of the light…of enlightenment.

Of course we also have the cycle of day and night, but in our hectic lives and with our tiny grasp of time and patience, we almost do not even notice, so much do we take this cycle for granted. But every day is a cycle of darkness and light as well.

A week or so ago we passed the mark of darkness, we passed the longest night, the Winter Solstice. And thanks to the effort of the Druids, (and others) instead of plunging endlessly into eternal night…the sun came back! (Go ahead and laugh! Go ahead and doubt! But they have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years…..…..do you want them to stop and see if it REALLY works or not?? Well, do you???) Giving us another cycle, another year, in which to work and play and laugh and cry…another year to fight the darkness. Not the darkness of night, or the darkness of Winter….but the darkness within ourselves, the darkness within Humanity itself.

In the last seven years, we have been plunged into a dark pool of death and destruction…yet again. Yet another cycle where mans inhumanity to man waxed, where all of the symptoms and behaviors and examples of the worst aspects of mankind have been on display.

This WILL end….eventually.

No cycle goes on for ever, no darkness is eternal.

And this darkness is no exception. No one can say with complete certainty when it will end…but we can say with certainty that at some point it will. After darkness, always follows the dawn. This is the birthplace of optimism. And I am an optimist, though after reading through history and watching my fellow humans…I am a cautious optimist. It would be easy for me to say that this cycle is over, that the light is about to reappear, that some form of cosmic warmth and sunlight is about to dawn.

And there are faint strains of …well, the best I can do is say…the are faint strains of non-darkness, lol….on the horizon. I will use but one example as illustration, because I think it is big enough to suffice: The NIE on Iran. I could be wrong, but the fact that the Forces of Darkness () were stopped in their tracks by LESSER Forces of Darkness (the CIA) is something we can point to and gain a little warmth. There was a turning point where we could have plunged even deeper nto the darkness, by attacking Iran. If the cycle of darkness was to continue and grow darker, that would have been the signal of it. It is not much…but in the darknees of the long night, every glimmer of light is meaningful.

We can take heart and warmth, then, from knowing that there are forces working to bring the light back. (besides < shudder > the CIA!) Combined with the fact that George “the torturer” Bush and Dick “bites the heads off of bunnies” Cheney will be out of office when the next cycle is done, there is enough of a reason to point at the horizon with a modicum of hope that the worst is over. The world has now truly seen the face of evil…and is slowly starting to come out of its fearful stupor…and turn towards the first glimmerings of a new dawn.

…and we can take heart and warmth and a small amount of pride in the fact that we in the blogosphere are among those forces.

I am a romantic….I am an optimist, but I do recognize that this could be yet another false dawn, that the thought that we have made it through the darkness is just wishful thinking. It certainly is a looooong way to midsummer, with a stunning menu of challenges still before us. We certainly cannot relax and lay down and wait for the warmth of the sun. We still have work to do, an amazing amout of it…but it is possible that we have turned a corner.

In some ways, we are in fact like modern day Druids. Throughout this long night we have stayed at our posts, weaving our blogospheric incantations and resistances to the darkness…and willing and or some of us, praying for the light to come back. We have each in our own way fought against the darkness, we have each held within us the vision of the light, the possibility of a world that is illuminated and enlightened by the warmth of human kindness, and cooperation. By the shining brilliance of a world at Peace.

If it is to be that out of the darkness will come light, then that light will come from the hearts of good people like you, people willing to resist and fight the darkness, good people willing to bring forth the light within themselves….and to try to spread it to others so that it may grow and shine.

It is just past midnight (perhaps) in this cycle of darkness. No time to go to our beds and rest, instead it is time to redouble our efforts of resisting the darkness and bringing back the light. Time to gather the tribes together, all of those who value peace and the light and to drum harder and indeed to sing and yell louder!

It is time to start bringing the light back, and in that light, to start building the new world. It won’t be quick, it won’t be easy…but it is time. It is our time. We may not see results right away, the night does not turn instantly to day. The Forces of Darkness are still strong, but the good people of the world are tired of this long night and are desperate for the light, are ready to join together to work for it. It is our task to join with them, to do what we can each in our own way, do to bring light and hope back into the world.

We don’t know how it will work, we don’t know exactly what to do….but we do know that the light always returns…it always has….and it will again. So keep working, keep fighting, and keep yelling!

And soon, it WILL be a new day.

And if we are lucky and work hard, the light of that new day will allow us to build a new cycle, a cycle where the light holds sway, and the darkness is beaten back. Maybe not forever, that is not the way it works, lol….but for long enough that we can build the new fires, the new structures, the new lights…that will make the darkness seem not quite so scary, and that will allow us to see better through the darkness and learn to not let it hold sway and power of us and our brothers and sisters again. This is the way the cycles work, it seems, plunging into darkness allows us to learn to build a better light….and hopefully, it is the time to do that. To emerge from this latest darkness and build a better light, a better world.

So until we reach the morning…hold your torches high!