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As I am writing, it is only a few weeks before the solar new year celebration, with all of the hopes and perceived potential for new beginnings – for each of us as individuals, as a nation, and perhaps as inhabitants of this planet. Yet despite this change in the calendar, the events in the world seem to go on in the same way that they have gone on before. Wars continue, poverty persists, authoritarian leaders consolidate their grip on power, and the ice caps melt as the mean temperature of the world continues to rise. It is a new year, but time passes on and the world seems not to notice. Our individual lives appear not to change that much either. We continue on, without much really changing as we wake up at the start of each day to go to sleep at the end of that day, as the week passes from Monday to Sunday and back again, as we repeat the same activities (be it at work or at play) time and time again.
Despite the lack of apparent change, we still continue to hope, to hope and believe that we can make positive change in our lives and make positive change in the world. Perhaps hoping that a new administration will come to power and bring an end to the war and lead the United States to once again become part of the community of nations; to hope that the leading nations of the world will finally get it that global warming threatens the existence of the planet and be willing to cooperate in the development of strategies that will start to stem the tide. There are reasons to hope as we see change in public opinion on major issues and more and more people try to live a greener life.
There are always reasons to feel hopeless and there are reasons to feel hopeful, but how is it possible to recognize the hopelessness and still continue to feel hope.
It is this conundrum that has been haunting me in these days leading up to the new year. More important than the approaching new year, for me it is the coming of the winter solstice which has more significance. The solstice, for reasons I can only begin to elaborate on, has always been an important time with a great deal of meaning. I have to admit that it is partly due to the anticipation of the longer hours of daylight to come, as well as being quite glad that the frenetic holiday season is coming to an end. Yet, the long dark night of the winter solstice, that longest night of the year, has always inspired a sense of renewed hope. This sense of renewal is tied up in the legends of rebirth surrounding this date in the ancient religions in their celebrations of the reawakening (the rebirth) of the ancient gods. The symbolism of rebirth and reawakening of the sun carries with it the promise of the reawakening of possibilities which we have not actualized the last time around as well as the awakening of new possibilities that we never realized.
But more importantly times such as the winter solstice provide us with the opportunity to take a moment to create break in time, to step outside the cycle of our daily lives, to employ our imagination and develop a vision of how we and how the world can be. We have been hearing a lot about vision lately. Vision, imagination, positive thinking, living your lives as if you were, where and are exactly what you want to be. There is nothing new about this, and there is some truth to it. You can not get some place unless you are willing to begin the journey. Every success, every accomplishment requires our believing that we can make it happen.
Personal spiritual growth, like political change, just does not happen on it s own. The realization of a vision takes a tremendous amount of work. It takes a willingness to be open, it takes a willingness to face all of our uncertainties and doubts, and it takes a commitment to see that vision through, no matter how many “failures”, no matter how many “setbacks.” But the commitment to vision, while requiring dedication, does not mean blind obedience, but the openness to follow it where it takes us, not adherence to a rigid and inflexible idea. In bringing about either spiritual or political change we cannot depend on others to make it happen for us, while none of us can make it happen on our own. We need others – we need to find the others with whom we resonate and be willing to be open and honest with them and ourselves in constructive and creative ways.
It is important to recognize that while the daily and annual cycles continue to move from one into the other, the potential exists within each of us to work to bring about change. Our planet will continue to rotate and revolve around the sun no matter what we do. How we live on this planet individually and together really does depend on each and every one of us.
The long winter night provides us with time to ponder, to turn inward and to reflect on how we can begin again. When the sun rises and the new year begins it is up to us as spiritual and political beings sharing this planet to figure out how we can live with all our disagreements and conflicts.
There is nothing idealistic about this, for do we really have any other choice?
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