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"The blessed summer light creates a euphoria
that runs through our veins...."

"Even in a good year, summer speeds past in a three-month flash, from mid-May to mid-August. In contrast to our long winter darkness, the blessed summer light creates a euphoria that runs through our veins. Hour after hour, there is still more time and more daylight to accomplish one more thing. If we told our kids to be home before dark, we wouldn't see them for weeks. The never-ending sun so elongates the days that by September, newcomers to the state (or 'Cheechakos') say they're exhausted enough to hibernate until spring."

I think that these few words can teach us much about the peril and the glory of our mortal frames and our mortal condition...and much about our Sarah! The best way to see this may be to pose a pair of hypothetical questions and conditions.

First, what if summer were never-ending in the Great Land (or anywhere else)? What if, instead of the glow and glory and "euphoria," as she says, of the swift-footed and swift-fated ninety days racing by in their flaming exultation, what if, instead of this, time plodded along in a never-ending, never-changing summer time? Would the days be so precious and, indeed, priceless? Would they have any meaning?

Second, what if this summertide never came at all? What if there was no hope for the coming of the days and times of warmth and light and action? What if we were comdemned to a perpetuity of confinement in the chains and fetters of darkness and of coldness and of frozen, lifeless inactivity?

On the contrary, Alaskans are given and we are given the gift of the golden season of brightness and activity. However, we are solemnly charged to cherish these days, to fill them with vigorous, noble exercises and strivings in our various fields of endeavor and of combat.

Consider the ancient wisdom of Odysseus, hero of Homer's The Odyssey. The goddess Calypso offered him unending life, unending youth, if he would stay with her on her island of Ogygia and forsake Ithaca and his people. The hero chose to return to his wife, Penelope; the hero chose to return home; the hero chose to remain mortal; the hero chose to remain human; the hero chose to remain a man...the hero chose to remain within the embrace of Time on this earth.

Surely it is the very limitations placed upon the hourglass of our minutes, hours, and days that, potentially, clothes all our time in robes of glory--if we use our time well.

We can imbibe this lesson anywhere on the planet, but I believe it has been more sharply and forcefully defined for those privileged souls who inhabit the great forty-ninth State!! Think of the paradox: Never-Ending Days That Will Soon End!!!

The gift of Sarah to this nation is ultimately a mystery that none of us can fully grasp or explain. The Secret is hidden and buried deep in the confluence and congruence of the Will of a Loving God and the free will of a loving servant of His ("a servant's heart"!!). Still, we can discern many factors that influenced her through the course of her life, beginning, of course, with her wonderful mom and dad!

However, the particular and peculiar geographical position of Alaska that engenders so bracing and striking a contrast between the Time of Light and the Time of Darkness is surely one of those powerful influences.

As we watch in awe, in admiration, in amazement while this little lion of a lady races up and down and across this land of ours, fighting, fighting always, fighting for America, we surely see the Alaskana girl who, very early in life, learned to use the Days of Summer, and to use them well!!

Now, indeed, as the Bard (Shakespeare) might say, has the Winter of Our National Discontent given way to the Glorious Summer of Sarah Palin of Alaska.

She will act for us;

She will not rest in her labors for us;

She will seize the golden rod that the turnings and movements of the Lord's celestial timetable have placed into her strong hands, and will wield that rod to crush the evil that threatens to engulf and enslave the land that she loves.

The Summer Days Are Verily Come!!

Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land!!!!

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