AS DARKNESS FALLS, THERE IS LIGHT

It won't be long now before we lose Daylight Savings Time. With it we lose minutes of sunlight each day until spring. Darkness will now slather more of our hours and more of our feelings. For some, a depressing time of year with actual medical implications. To others, a safety net that cocoons us from the din and dangers of the day.

I suppose the behavioral sciences can explain how darkness affects our optical nerve, our genetic makeup, even our brain circuitry. And that's useful. But hardly definitive. For a more valuable understanding of the approaching darkness we need our poets:

Out of darkness the hand that reaches through nature molded man....Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong; no matter how fast light travels, it finds darkness got there first....I say there is no darkness but ignorance....When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

See what I mean?

Watch for it now, for it's a subtle thing. Our sun flees sooner during the afternoons in which summer children still want to play. Purple shadows conquer burnished sunsets more quickly during our drive home. However, the glow of window lights are now clicking on all through the neighborhood, whispering to by-passers that warm and toasty things are taking place inside.

You see, not everyone is pushing and shoving in the metropolitan workplaces. Mothers can still be found in kitchens readying family dinners. Work-at-home husbands are in there tapping on their keypads. Grandparents nod off in their favorite chairs. Dogs rest. Kittens purr. The rhythms of the world can be felt easing ever so subtly.

As the darker afternoons seep into the earlier nights, a hundred million minds start to travel. Held safe by the night, they travel to kinder yesterdays and to tantalizing tomorrows. There is more time in the darkness to travel these frontiers too often shut closed in the daylight. And so it that the longer fall and winter nights breed possibilities for which summertime games and beaches had too little interest.

Here's a thought. Between now and March there just may be more fermentation of creative -- at least constructive -- ideas than at any other time in the year! Now if these ideas are allowed to take root -- free of the absurdity of too much reality television and dis-informed political complaining -- who knows what good things might be birthed during the coming days? Here in our city. In our nation. Oh, and even in our Capitol!