Light in the darkness

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I’m a solar-powered creature and don’t much like the darkness of winter, but I love the symbolism of this season: the rekindling of light in the darkness. It is, in a sense, our yearly miracle, and the fact that it’s caused by the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun doesn’t make it any less magical to me.

We are now one year into my monthly series of tikkun olam posts. (Linked to the DW mirror because that’s where the most responses have been happening.) The darkness, as always, seems like it will go on forever. But if we’re to turn the corner and head back toward a brighter world, it won’t happen automatically; it takes effort, and the more of us who try, the faster it will go.

Tikkun olam: repairing the world. Volunteering, donating, performing acts of kindness. Whatever you have done in the last month to make the world a better place, whatever you have planned for upcoming days, share it here. You don’t have to apologize for not doing more or deprecate what you’ve done. Sometimes we’ve got more in us; sometimes we’ve got less. But anything is greater than nothing, and so anything, however small, is worth counting.

2 Responses to “Light in the darkness”

  1. swantower

    My own contributions: apart from the usual petition-signing and office-calling, I’ve been continuing my efforts to personalize the emails I send to my elected officials, so it won’t just be another copy of something they’ve read already.

    A couple of weeks ago I volunteered to assist with re-mulching the rose garden in a local park.

    I’ve donated again to the Native American Rights Fund, as I did around this time last year.

    I’m trying to be extra-thrifty about re-using things, repairing them instead of replacing them, etc.

    And I intend to donate to either a food drive, a toy drive, or both this month.

  2. Roxanna

    I feel like the world is full of horrible news, horrible movie, horrible stories focused on evil. Stories about things blowing up, people dying, suffering, cheating and those kinds of things. I am trying to create a literature of mindfulness, not about mindfulness, that already exist and there is plenty to read. But mindful stories focused on peaceful stuff. I just started like three months ago, this is no more than an experiment. Maybe if it can help somebody who is sad or anxious feel a little bit calmer, it could be counted as a random act of kindness? I will have to wait and see.

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