Hard to believe the autumn equinox is coming up in a week or so, and the darker months will be upon us.
I’m trying to imagine a story or mythology about the eternal struggle between Light and Dark — half of the time Light gains the upper hand, but Dark rallies and the days grow slowly colder. And like a stopped annual clock, twice a year their game ends in a tie.
One year Dark cheats and wins more than his share, and spring is delayed. The resulting imbalance shows Dark that he cheats himself by cheating his opponent, who is his brother.
I don’t fully accept the metaphor that Light and Dark must balance. Good does not need an equal supply of Evil for a balanced world, so the analogy does not fit exactly. But I can see the balance in nature — life and death, light and dark, summer and winter. In that sense, to everything there is a season.
I don’t agree that there is a time for hate, or a time for war, but I accept that in most cases there must be a balance. Fear not, for the dawn is coming, inevitably.
I know where the four winds blow. I raise my sail to catch the way I want to go. “Slow,” I says to myself, “go slow,” but my soul wants to fly, I’m not quite sure why — probably because time rushes so.
And if I sit here too long, will I turn to stone? Will I die right here, stock still and all alone? Have I always been a child, or have I grown? The day is creeping past, and I feel out of gas. Have I seen all that this day might have shown?
It feels dumb to sit here, grasping for a rhyme. It’s not as if I do this all the time, and wasting precious moments seems a crime. Yet it’s more than I’ve attempted before, so maybe this is part of the design.
And so I mumble further down the page, hoping now I finally break out of the cage in search of cures for everybody’s rage. I know it’s probably futile, the world is far too brutal, but dreams might usher in a peaceful age.
I put Tom Petty’s Wildflowers on the turntable and realized he made that album more than 30 years ago. Thirty years is a long time, more than a third of a lifetime for most folks and more than an entire lifetime for more people than seems fair. And 30 years before that was my youth.
Long times ago, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, we heard the songs and the possibilities were endless. Somewhere along the way we began to slow our search for possibilities; even though they were still endless, we didn’t expect them anymore. This was the way things were, and we were not going to change them. That was life’s lie, of course. We always had the power. We have the power today.
This does not have to be “the way it is” — those hands right in front of your eyes have all the power you need to craft a different future, a future different from your present, and this morning is as good a time as any to start making that different place.
“Make a difference” — the very phrase says a difference is something you have to make, you have to build. Oh, a difference can be imposed on you — but where’s the joy in that? Why live in someone else’s world when you can make your own?
Make your own difference. Be the change you want to see. Thirty and sixty years ago, it all seemed so promising and possible, and somewhere along the way we became discouraged that we could change the world. But we did make changes, we built and we grew, and we preserved and conserved, and the world way out there didn’t seem to change much — until decades had gone by and so much was different, and one day we woke up and saw: We made that difference.
Bit by bit, one day at a time, year by year, change happens. Nothing lasts forever, not the sweetest happily-ever-after and not the most horrifying horror. All things must pass, and all things change. It’s up to you, it’s up to me, it’s up to us to work on making it a change for the better. We probably disagree on what “better” looks like, and so you be you and I’ll be me and let’s not try to mess with each other’s dreams except when they harmonize.
Thirty and sixty years on, so much is better. (My 2019 car runs well, and the odometer says 210,000 — sixty years ago our cars were done after 100K miles.) We have not solved hatred or tyranny, but lives are better because of those who would not stand for it.
And always, then and now, the power of change is right there at the end of your arms, in your heart, and behind your eyes.
