The quiet days as one year is ending and another begins offer time to settle and slip into the moment. In the stillness, there’s time to breathe, and time to reflect on our gains and losses, leaps and stumbles, joys and sorrows, all in a widening context of meaning and possibility.
The year just ending saw citizen activists occupying the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, and countless hundreds of thousands surging into the squares of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria, as well as France, England, Australia, the U.S., Greece, Italy, Ireland, India. Actually, the powerful impetus of social change swept into nearly every country in the world, with citizens flooding into the streets in jubilant, defiant, non-violent displays.
In some places the people’s determination and non-violent vision surged over barricades and brought leaders down. Elsewhere, oppression escalated into violence, non-violence was abandoned, and the outcomes are still in question.
But in many 
places, the exhilarating solidarity of newly-emboldened citizens stretched across cities and oceans and continents, declaring in unequivocal terms, “This is what democracy looks like!”
Each new dawn and each new day holds mystery. What lies ahead has yet to take shape, as past and present mingle and flow into form. But some of that shape is up to us. How much startling beauty, radical courage, bright cooperation, justice with dignity, loving generosity, full-blown magic, and peace beyond all imagination will we create?
If not us, who? If not now, when?
