It’s been a long time coming, this fresh new year. Light-filled. A day I had mourned as lost. I wondered that I’d ever find the light again. I scrabbled hard with it here, chased after it, but even so, I could feel the hopelessness overtake me, my head slip under the water.
A heart-friend and I sat long over tea and discussed all that had been and what was to be and the dreams that whisper quietly. We talked about the words I scribble out here. It’s a lesson, sometimes, to visit your own history, look backwards. I marvel at how much things changed for me over the course of the last few years- while my life itself feels a bit of a fog and memory fails, my journaling here kept witness. Sometimes it’s only when the sun returns that we can understand how truly dark the storm was that we passed through.
And now the light. I’ve actually pulled out my ‘big girl’ camera, set the shutter, adjusted the lighting. I had to capture my heart, you see. This glow that suffuses, that we see at the corner of our eyes and marvel at in the sunrise, the emerald greens, sapphires, gold, cotton-tail white of a sunny day. It’s been there all along, but I’ve needed to breathe it afresh.
I wear a new name- a candle lit in the hushed hours of Christmas Eve- and I am called newly illumined. And it is in this hush that I find my word, my desire, for 2013. Illumine. The transitive verb of illuminate. To enlighten. To set alight. To make clear. To bring to the forefront. To set alight.
I pray that no matter what comes to me this year, I would learn to glow. To set alight with the flame of faith and trust in the One who made me and calls me. May it be so.