12.21.12  There is dreary rain on this cold dark morning.  The lake is totally silent and water droplets hang like tiny Christmas lights on the bare branches.  Silver water covers the thin ice on the ponds.  It feels fitting for today, the one week anniversary of the Newtown shootings.  I found a white feather on my run this morning.  I like to think it came from a tundra swan but I have not heard their mournful cry for some time now.  ”Hope is the thing with feathers” wrote Emily Dickinson.   On this day of the Longest Night, I find a white feather.  What hope our ancestors must have had that the sun would return again to the sky.  In Newtown, such despair that light will ever return again.

Carol Jung wrote, “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”  I light a morning candle every day in December and tonight I will let it burn all through the dark, cold night, with gratitude that the light does return, the nights do get shorter, and the stars and planets are in their rightful place.