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Gods, it's dark.

These mornings I'm mostly up by 5: dark outside, dark inside. We've already lost Summer's long twilights. Now the Sun goes down and wham! it's dark, with nary a time between.

In a moon's time, paradoxically, I'll be able to navigate in here at this hour without turning on lights, what with all the ambient urban light reflected from the snow.

But for now, with the leaves still on the trees, and the creeper on the side of the house, I'm moving by feel.

Every few years, we hold our Samhain on an island at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. In the stone-built WPA hall with its central hearth, it's easy to forget what century you're in.

What I always notice most is how dark it is.

Last time, we must have had 50 candles burning on the tables to light our feast: a spendthrift extravagance of light for this most festive of feasts. Even so, it's dark. I think about the ancestors, who viscerally understood this annual descent into darkness in a way that we, with our electric-lit lives, hardly can.

Walking up the street this morning, the beauty of the waning Moon in the southeastern sky pierced my heart like a spear, the pearly, opalescent colors of crescent and disc precisely mirroring those of the pre-dawn sky. Only early-risers truly appreciate the Wane.

Darkness and Awakening. These are, in my personal estimation and temperature taking of the zeitgeist,  the two great themes of 2017. Whether you look at the year from a macro or micro view, take it personally or put a more universal perspective to your lens, these are the recurring motifs.  Even the 2017 Word of the Year that has been identified is complicit. It speaks both of a knowing darkness and a guilty glimmer of self-insight. We ask ourselves these days if we are 'Woke.' That implies awakening from, perhaps a dream or very deep slumber. Some people awake with a jolt. Others emerge slowly in a fug of confusion. But awakening eventually happens, even in the darkness of a December morning.

I have been away for some time. And I have, unfortunately been away for a reason many of us know all too well:  Depression laid me low for several months from early spring all the way through the summer. I did not take the election of the current president of the US well, and my depression was, I believe, a manifestation of the agonies that many people went through at that time. 

I am pleased to report, however, that as the season darkens, my mood lightens, and that as I prepare for my annual winter solstice retreat, Going into the Dark, I delight in the grey and the rain and the lowering clouds of the Pacific Northwest. There is still the occasional visible sunrise or sunset, the first late and the second early, but mostly we are now in the rains of early winter. 

Indigenous peoples get representation at this year's PantheaCon. A black Pagan outlines her path for resistance. And another Pagan blogger writes about maintaining spiritual discipline in times of extreme trial and stress. It's Watery Wednesday, our segment about news within the Pagan community here and around the world. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

My daughter and I love watching BBC / PBS shows.  Victoria is the most recent one we are watching.  As I watched how people lived in the 1800s, I considered what it would be like to only have my life lighted by candles and sunlight.  It would certainly make the dark part of the year different.

By 4:00 or so at night, flickering candlelight would be my only illumination.  This reduces my scope of environment drastically.  Right now, if it’s dark I flip a switch and illumination of my surroundings occurs.  But what if I only had dripping smelly candles to light my way?  What would it feel like to be surrounded by darkness?  Would fear well?  Would loneliness envelop? 

Growing up, my mother used to have white candles in the every window at Christmas time.  I remember loving how it looked.  Our traditions was different from most of the other people I know.  

Christmas eve my siblings and I went to the barn with my father.  Cows were milked, fed, tended.  None of us could go to the house.  We weren't allowed to go outside to play.  We all had to stay in the barn while the chores were being done.  My mother stayed in the house.  As an adult, I know she was prepping the house, gifts, and stockings for us.  As a child I thought it was magical.  

 The longest night is upon us. For three short days, we have watched the watery sun rise and set in the same place on the horizon, barely skimming the treetops at its highest point, filmed over by hazy clouds. This morning, it was impossible to tell just when the sun had risen, and indeed even though it has been up for half an hour, it's just as dark as before, with heavy overcast skies letting in only a small amount of light. I lit a candle in my lantern dedicated to Brighid just as the sun rose somewhere behind the clouds, and in Her name I lit my solstice flame. The candle's flame burns very low, just barely alight as it struggles amidst a pool of wax and an insufficient wick. There is the tiniest amount of light at the tip, with a small blue aura beneath. I look at it even as I type these words, and its struggle portends much to come.  

It has been a difficult year for many. Across the Western world, we have been rocked by unprecedented political change. There is not much hope for the future. Political leaders do not have the common good in mind, and greed runs riot. Things have not changed for the better. Across the globe, war, strife and unrest rage, with millions of innocent beings suffering.  And there is still more darkness to come.