Renewal

 The northern hemisphere of the earth has done its annual tilt away from the sun and will only begin the journey back on the day after Winter Solstice. These dark days can be tough, and we all look forward to the brighter days of Spring< and Summer. Yet, it is in the midst of these dark days that we set our intentions for a New Year and look to it for renewal.

This is often a time when we find ourselves still seeking light. Stargazers everywhere are standing outside, in several layers of wool and warmth, looking up into the darkness of infinite space. In this darkness the stars become bright ~brighter than they appear on any summer night. Those small specks of light that pierce the dark have been capturing our attention ever since we appeared on this planet.

To look up at starlight, is to look into infinity. Photons ~ packets of light might have left the stars we are looking at billions of years ago, so long ago that the star itself might have died, but its light still travels, reaching out into infinity.

That light ~ a dear friend, Will Keepin, a physicist ~ explained to me, has
travelled for centuries silently through the dark. As we gaze at it, it enters our retina and becomes encoded into electrical and chemical signals in our brain. Those few photons ~ that bit of light ~ travelled through vast space just to meet our gaze, to connect us to a space so far away we cannot even imagine it. And now, when we are looking, it reminds us of our oneness with the vastness we came from.

No wonder so many of us ~ from vastly different faith backgrounds ~ find joy in this darkness: Hindus celebrating the victory of light over dark with Divali right at the start of the dark months; Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah ~ the Festival of Light; Christians celebrating Advent and Christmas; Buddhists celebrating Bodhi Day to commemorate the enlightenment of Gautama under the bodhi tree; the ancient Wicca celebrated this as a time of renewal; and so on.

Standing in the dark, beneath this starlight, we recall that our gaze connects us to infinity and calls us to renewal. We remind ourselves that it is in the renewal
of each of us that the whole is renewed.

Swami Ambikananda Saraswati