On this longest night of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere), I’m reminded that darkness is necessary for us human beings, as it is for other animals and for the seeds and roots buried in the earth. We need darkness for sleep, the time when our body repairs itself and our mind knits themselves anew in our dreams.

Darkness is beautiful and necessary, but the light of the sun is essential, too. It is the source of the energy that powers our bodies and those of all other living things. Since we human beings aren’t able to use the sun’s energy directly, we must obtain it either from the plants that convert solar energy through photosynthesis, or by eating animals that have eaten plants, or both.

Sunlight warms us, too, when we burn wood. It powers our furnaces and cars, when we burn the gas which once was the bodies of prehistoric animals who, one way or another, like humans, ate the sunlight captured by plants.

However we consume the sun’s energy, our bodies are powered by sunlight. The sun radiates light generously and freely. I am always astonished when I consider how it gives itself away without ceasing, nurturing us and all living things on planet Earth.

For all of this, as I wait in the darkness of this longest night, I give thanks.