Now the dark is upon us. The late afternoons are suddenly devoid of light, plunging our spirits into an ancient human fear that the sun will never return.
Our national world plunges into a deeper and deeper darkness; the lights of democracy flicker. The movie we go to see on a lowering winter afternoon, Darkest Hour, echoes our dread exactly. We tend to forget how dim English hopes were in1940, when, the politicians wanting a “peace agreement” with Hitler having very nearly forced Winston Churchill to abandon all resistance, invasion by the Nazis seemed inevitable.
Most Republicans have struck an agreement with an American President who, in tones unnervingly similar to Hitler’s, thunders his misogyny, racial supremacy, homophobic and anti-immigrant tirades down upon us while ecstatically applauded by thousands of followers.
Many of us, following Robert Reich’s Churchillian refusal to normalize the tyrannical features of this presidency for a single moment, have thrown ourselves into political resistance. 
Nevertheless, several of my women, LGBT, progressive and Jewish friends have found the dread darkness of our time so unnerving that they have actually sunk into depression.
Like many of our ancestors, when the darkest nights of the year fall upon us, we feel a profound need for light. We set candles on our windowsills, challenge the night with outdoor illumination, and string our Christmas trees all about with brightness, hoping in our feeble way to turn the darkness into light.
The Celtic peoples believed that the world was created out of a vast outer darkness, which, when the light of creation shone forth, was never absolute again.
Toward the end of Fly Out of the Darkness, the second novel in my Infinite Games series, the world of my Marshlanders was as dark as ours is now, everyone feeling puny and weak before the forces of an engulfing evil. From somewhere in my imagination a character named Father Robin had emerged, a priest of the banished old (Catholic) religion (I don’t know how he got into my novels; one day he was just there). At the midwinter solstice, the darkest night of the year, as my heroes prepare for a final engagement with their enemies, this wispy old priest mounts a wooden box to preach his last sermon.
“Fear not evil,” the ordinarily soft spoken little man shouted forth suddenly. “The universe is luminous with good. There was only one utter darkness, and only that one time, into which the light poured that is all around us, even to this day.
I am not denying that evil can touch us, and mark us, and wound us, and even kill us.
What I am saying is that evil is a shadow, and a shadow is always cast by a light. If you crouch in a shadow, you are holding yourself back from the light that casts it.
That brightness does not shine from afar, it shines from within. The light of the world is in you and in me and in the heart of our beloved community!”
Have courage, friends. Light your candles in every window, so that we can find each other to go forth together in courage and fortitude to combat the darkness.
With wishes for a blessed solstice to all. Annis Pratt