Month: December 2025

Things have changed for me in this season of gifts and wishes. I no longer wish for a bicycle, something electronic, or a new car or camera – not that I wouldn’t enjoy them.

Nowadays, I wish we had a government oriented to meeting the individual and collective needs of every resident on this land, and contributes to the global well-being of our neighbors in the world.

I wish we had a president who knew something other than how to gain attention, accrue power, and profit, and knew something about humanity, culture, civics, our constitution, about truth and poetry.

I wish we had a competent person heading Health and Human Services who knew something about research and who could integrate the methods of “scientific” medicine and other traditions of health, healing, and well-being – not just a cog in a political machine of disruption.

I wish we had a secretary of education that knew something about education and had a goal of improving its functioning – not just reducing it to a cash cow for profiteers and religious propaganda.

I wish we had someone at the head of consumer protection actually devoted to the protection of the consumer, rather than the exploitation of consumers by corporations.

I wish we had a justice system that was just, that supported the idea of justice unrelated to status, wealth, ethnicity, race; a just system that reflects the ideal of liberty and justice for all.

I wish we had media that give us something other than one-dimensional heroes with violent and destructive pseudo solutions to life’s problems and, instead, offered models of wholeness, growth, construction, and triumph over human foibles. There’d be fewer explosions and more revelations, less heat and more light.

I wish we had more religions that could integrate their ideologies with the world we face today, not for the glories of individual advantage, development, wealth, or salvation, but for service and the recognition of how each one of us is embedded with the greater world and what harms one of us hurts all of us.

I wish we had a non-toxic economic system that incentivized innovation, entrepreneurship and the well-being of individuals and communities.

I wish we had a society that values truth, kindness, taking care of us and our neighbors; a society that expects much from those who have been given much.

And finally, I wish for more poetry, more truth-telling, more grass-roots music and more books.

Darkness is not just the absence of light. Darkness has its own presence. It is an invitation to withdraw from outer things, people, activities, attachments, and ideas. This means to turn toward the mysterious inner landscape that exists beneath all our thoughts and actions. It’s mysterious, unpredictable, often unruly, and does not necessarily follow our social and personal expectations.

I suspect it’s that unpredictable mystery that inclines our culture to grasp for ideas and activities that emphasize light – candles, tree lights, rituals, lawn and house decorations – and to focus on the turning season that promises new light. I also suspect that any new light doesn’t come to most of us because we do not really give up the old light that dwelling adequately in the darkness would allow us to do.

We are often apprehensive In the dark, we don’t know what might move inside us or around us, what might confront us, what unresolved issues might present themselves. These things don’t come to torment us. They invite us to digest them fully and take the power out of them in any way we might have at our disposal – contemplation, therapy, journaling bodywork, a new study or discipline, shamanic healing, or spiritual or energetic healing.

The darkness is an invitation to a world of greater light, healing, and revelation.