Starting over over and over again

It is almost time to start over, over again.

Or, as the great philosopher says, "It's deja vu all over again."

We are waking to darkness. We walk home in darkness. The sun is a stranger. Night is long. Twilight is about as good as it gets.

Not here, of course. On behalf of the Colorado Tourism Bureau or Department or Agency, I must remind you that our days, short though they be, are spectacular with sun so bright one can drive a convertible with the top down through a foot of newly fallen snow.

But, apart from that, it is the season that is the reason someone invented Prozac. Light is missing.

Now there is a truth for the ages. Light is missing.

We wait for the light and while waiting we create diversions to remind us that reality is not always real, not always the same, that things cycle and change and light returns.

So we Swedes celebrate Lucia. Our family started the Lucia season yesterday with cousins here laughing and telling stories and maybe even making up stories of ancient lore that bind us together and point us to something coming, to a future of light -- even if it is a past with its darkness that connects us most primally. Dreams that set families out on boats across wide oceans to settle in barren valleys and find life harder than they bargained for.

We are heirs of these immigrants who walked in darkness and waited for the light. We begin the cycle over, and over again, again, now in these days of waiting for the nadir of the year and the slowly arising gift of new light.

I am a sucker for new beginnings. I celebrate them all. Chinese New Year. Rosh Hoshanah, Opening Day, Easter. But most of all, this solstice and its reality of darkness, dim twilight, a descent into a depressing (for me) place of gloom, this is the real beginning of a new time.

I know I know, it is not here yet. We have a ways yet to descend. Even here in Chamber of Commerce perfection Colorado, I will go kicking and screaming. (Not literally; there is Prozac for that.) But I will be waiting. And in these days of increasing darkness, of short days, twilight, I will plan and dream and think of the promise that is as sure as the rotation of the planet.

Light will come. And boy, howdy, do we need it.

I do, at least.