A Solstice Meditation: Out of the Darkness Comes the Light

Approaching the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, it is a time for reflection. These are the darkest days of the year, but the light will return in the inevitable cycle of the seasons. This is a good thought to hold as we head into some pretty dark times. In the cycle of life, the interplay of opposites yields movement. I am confident that the dark times we are about to witness will yield a movement to the light. Where will it come from? The very contradictions in which we are entangled.

We are seeing the national government of the United States take a hard right turn. For some years, those of us who value justice, peace and the health of nature on which we all depend will be in a defensive mode vis-à-vis the federal administration. This will drive us to a new level of political and cultural creativity, one already evidenced at the grassroots.

When I look across the landscape I am heartened at the ferment I see in cities and states, communities and bioregions. People taking matters in hand to work for practical solutions to the real problems people face. Movements for public banking, social housing, single-payer health insurance. Experiments in basic income. Ecological restoration efforts resulting in dam removals and restoration of fish runs. Climate action plans in states and cities. People building solidarity economies, turning businesses into worker coops, forming cooperative housing communities, moving money out of banks into credit unions, creating community supported agriculture networks. People are thinking creatively about alternatives to current growth-centered economic models to ones that focus on common well-being. Here’s a recent example.

I could go on, but the point is that the picture of reversal at the federal level is in sharp contrast to progressive forward motion at the grassroots where people live and are together working for practical solutions. Over the coming year, I’ll be devoting more attention to these efforts, and how we might weave them together into a new political movement that results in change at all levels.

Looking to history, for many decades before the 1930s depression, ideas for social reform were percolating such as old age pensions, unemployment insurance, legal protection for labor organizing, minimum wages and maximum work hours major public infrastructure investments, and regulation of financial institutions. They were long advocated by progressive movements, but had a hard time gaining traction at the national level until the crisis of the depression when they all came to fruition.

Everything seems to indicate we are heading into another time of crisis, when multiple economic bubbles burst while the impacts of climate disruption intensify and social conflict increases. Out of these contradictions change will emerge. I believe the groundwork is being laid at the grassroots, in those movements of political organizing and cultural innovation, and efforts to conceive new economic and social models. The root meaning of crisis is a turning point. We are heading into a big crisis that will produce a major turning when the old models are discredited and people look for new models that work. That is what is being pioneered at the grassroots. At some point these efforts will gain critical mass, spurred on by crisis.

Thus, at this moment of the solstice, when the light begins to return and the days begin to grow longer, it is not a time to sink into despair, but to regard the very circumstances that might cause it as a summons to action. As people we are not powerless. We have many avenues to act. The coming years will challenge us. Let us rise to those challenges with the belief we can build a better world. That out of the darkness will come the light. The ferment at the grassroots says we have it in us. We can do it if we come together to make it happen. Let us find the ways to make it so.

This first appeared in The Raven..

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