Summers in my twenties: the edge of the Charles River, catching the light off the early morning water while learning to crew; or now and then, the sky lit with neon as boats launched fireworks, and children lit sparklers. Now, I wait for the ten days in June when the fireflies come to dance in the yard just below mine, where our neighbor hosts a wildflower garden of blues and pinks and whites. Light is everywhere if only we are prepared to see it and recognize it’s evanescent gifts.
I don’t know where you find hope today. I don’t know how exactly to read the morning headlines and not do anything except sigh and heave my body into the day with a grim determination to get something done. I do know that without the luminosity of irises, or the moon, twinkle lights or the stars I am lost more than not, bereft more than not.
“Hope is not logical,” said Anne Lamott, and I think this is true. How a tiny insect, alive a mere 60 days, or a flash of powder, gone after seconds, can help me hold it all I cannot say, except to say perhaps this: radiance in any of its forms does the thing we are all seeking – it casts aside the dark.
And here for you, a poem/prayer I have come to love that also illuminates a kind of light:
may the stars carry your sadness away
may the flowers fill your heart with beauty
may hope forever wipe away your tears
and above all may silence make you strong
– Chief Dan George, Chief, Tsleil-Waututh Nation
May the silence of the night sky, those blossoming flowers and twinkling little bugs somehow, in some way, make you strong.
Maria
