The Age of Enlightenment
What is light
If more than the absence of darkness?
Black is the absorption
Of all light
And so we fear it
As we fear being similarly consumed.
But light penetrates even our fears.
It cuts a bright sword slash
Through the dull dimness
To reveal,
To warm,
To nourish,
And
To expose —
And even burn away.
And so I’d wager
That just as many
Fear the light
As have terror for the night.
Yes, the exposing horrors of the day
Wait to seize upon us
Like a league of Templar knights,
Their piercing clarions
A battle cry for truth,
Their burnished silver shackles
Threatening to chain us
To our hypocrisy and shame —
Or worse,
To something we deserve.
And so we run back to the shadows
To hide.
To dim.
To disappear.
But just as darkness both looms
And shelters,
Light, gently, can warm us
So that we emerge
Into a different kind of safety;
That of being seen —
Truly,
For who we are —
And loved,
Despite the deep creases in our lives
That line our bodies in shadow
And blue-black bruises.
What good is a surgeon
Without an operating light,
Or a mirror
With nothing to reflect?
Like trees,
And moss,
And algae slimes,
We are creatures of the sun,
Unable to live forever
In hidden caves of safety.
We may need protection
At times
From the searing sunlight,
But we also need the Daystar’s lighter touch
To sustain us
Lest we become pale and brittle
In the many-shadowed crevices
We may call home.
Though they may be familiar,
Though we may have even
Claimed these dark places
As our birthright
Or birth defects,
We cannot stay there.
All of us
And our solar kin
Must have light —
Or die.
And I want to live.
I want to see light
Reflected on laplet waves
And refracted in crystal
That only shines
Once unearthed,
Holding within its heart a frozen rainbow,
Having waited eons
To be discovered
And treasured in my palm.
I want to feel
The sun-warmed grass
As it tickles my footsteps
With long soft fingers.
Even here in my living room
The old coffee table
Incandesces its warm wood grain
Under lamps and candlelight,
Each ring-stain, scratch, and watermark
A story of a living being
That shared a moment of their life with me.
I want to taste the sunlight
Captured in green things,
Tender on the tongue
And sugared red and blue and yellow
In nectar-laden fruit.
The pineapple spikes its golden spears
Through tastebuds
Just as orange and lemon
Invoke the sunrise in my body
With each drop
Of their glimmering tang.
Like a bee
Drawn to the contrast
Of purple and yellow blooms,
I too want to be captured
By the traps of floral beauty,
So caught by their enticement
That I stop
And lean in quickly,
And with a gasp,
Inhale their bright fragrance
So that it becomes a perfume
In my blood,
And the quickening
Of my romance with the earth.
I want each tiny cloud of steam
Rising from my cup
To tease the sun
With gentle whispers
Of distant lands
Where high mountains
Rise above the clouds
To offer up their verdant peaks,
Turning sunlight into flavor
And awakeness.
Is it any wonder
That the Age of Enlightenment
Arrived on those merchant ships
Along with crates of tea?
How many ways
Does light sustain us?
How many chapels
Does it build within our lives,
Illuminating all
Within and without
With stained glass bombast
So that we too become a jewel,
Brilliant in having been cut
And made more lovely
By impurities
That turn a colorless stone
Into a gem of fire?
And what of light from flames
That burn away the choking undergrowth?
I have seen grand and terrifying fires
That consume entire forests,
And I have seen the astonishment of growth
That always
Always
Comes just after.
Even the laser
Can kill
Or blind
Or cure
And can even paint the night
With an artist’s dancing vision.
So
Great spirit of the sun
Expose me
As I step into your light.
Have your way
As you have always done,
Ageless
And aging agent,
Great Father of us all
Who gives us daily life.
Last week my brother, Adrian, and his wife, Cameron, were in town, so I took some time off to be with them. Adrian is a true outdoorsman, and if anyone in my family is solar powered, it is him. He is full of energy and humor, eyes twinkling with mirth and curiosity.
For fifteen years we were completely estranged, with no contact whatsoever, and now, through a lot of grace, patience, honesty, and open-mindedness, we are best friends. We live on opposite sides of the country, though, and we both lead busy lives, so we usually only get to see each other once a year.
For some reason, however, I found myself dreading his visit as it loomed closer. I didn’t really know why, but then we spoke a few days before his arrival, and I realized that we both had a sense that this would be a difficult visit due to our dad.
Several years ago Adrian and I orchestrated my dad’s move to Arizona so my husband and I could take care of him. Our dad is mentally ill, having attempted suicide twice and having relapsed into his alcoholism late in life. We love him, but he’s a handful, and he can be hard to be around. For this visit, my brother and I discussed the possibility of an intervention. We talked about how great he was as a dad for ten years after his first suicide attempt in 1997, which got him into therapy and on medication. We reminisced with stories of a happy, loving, thoughtful father — the father we didn’t have as children, and the father we lost when, in a manic phase, he quit taking his medications in 2007 and spiraled back into his old misery.
Sure enough, almost as soon as Adrian and his wife arrived, they were confronted with the reality that while my dad may have survived his previous suicide attempts, he was still killing himself slowly with alcohol and persistent negativity. They were grief-stricken and angry — and then we went on a hike.
It was a gorgeous day, and the desert canyons had come alive with all the incredible winter rains Tucson has enjoyed this year. For several hours, even though we talked a lot about my dad and the difficulties we need to sort out in his care, the immense beauty surrounding us at every turn kept grabbing our attention. For every hard conversation about my dad’s physical and emotional health, there were thousands of wildflowers. For every sinking realization that our dad is actively dying, some precious winged thing would grab our attention — a raven here, bees on flowers over there, a hummingbird flitting right up to our faces, hawks circling on canyon drafts…the gravity of our bleak situation couldn’t pull us down while we were buoyed by so many beautiful distractions.
After an entire day of hiking, we made our way back to the car exhausted and joyful, just as a glowing sunset started to paint the desert with its golden vibrancy.
Then, when we got home, our dad came over and started drinking, passing out on the couch. We lit a bonfire and woke him up, and he struggled even to walk a few steps, both from the alcohol and his poor cardiovascular health, which seems to get worse by the day. This was clearly not a man who had long to live.
Even so, we relished this rare chance for us all to be together, and we tried to make the most of it. Cameron, my brother’s wife, is newer to the family, so every story my dad told was fresh to her. And even though I’d heard most of them a hundred times, I always love to hear my dad speak about his past. As he talked, he got more animated, and for a while it actually seemed like he was enjoying himself, even when he was complaining. It wasn’t the visit my family had hoped for, but Adrian and I were able to make the most of it and glad we still had a chance to experience this with our dad. We know we don’t have many of these opportunities left.
Being surrounded by the grandeur of nature all day had given us a type of joyful lift and perspective. As hard as things get in our lives, there is always, always, always something beautiful out there waiting for us to appreciate it. We had such a great day together, and nothing was going to take that away.
The next morning, though, my dad was even worse than usual. Probably hung over, it seemed like every little thing annoyed him. He even griped about there being too many blueberries on his pancakes. After breakfast, he just wanted to go home and sleep. He even said that he was irritated because this visit made him jealous of my brother’s ability to travel.
That hurt. It cost a lot for Adrian and Cameron to fly out here, and since my brother started a new job recently, he has precious little vacation time. Plus, we were doing everything we could to make my dad happy and include him, but he just wasn’t interested in spending any time with us.
So, we changed our plans. We accepted the fact that my dad was not going to be able to physically or emotionally participate in my brother’s brief visit, so we tried to make the best of it. We let him rest at home, and then went somewhere Adrian and Cameron had never been.
We decided on a last-minute day trip to Tubac, a little artist’s enclave just north of the Mexican border. As soon as we got in the car, there nature was, distracting us again. Even from the freeway we could see the snow-capped mountains, the palo verde trees with their emerald trunks, the sun’s shadow play on craggy cliff faces, the leafy green-tufted pathway of the river stretching between Tucson and Tubac, so full of life, like the canyon we’d hiked the day before.
Then, as we perused the galleries and shops, we encountered a million more reasons to delight. Mexican tapestries, hand-painted wares, whimsically printed dish towels, silly yard art, blown glass — everywhere there were trinkets and baubles and even a few masterpieces to capture our attention. Although we talked more about what to do about our dad, we still found ourselves sinking into the enjoyment of the moment, because Tubac was too happy a town to allow us to wallow in our worries.
Before coming back home to spend another evening with our dad, the rest of us enjoyed an incredible dinner at Elvira’s, which is a local treasure. The menu is fresh and locally inspired, but more amazing is the interior, where every square inch is decorated with hand-blown glass, painted tiles, old church candlesticks covered with wax drippings, pierced tin ornaments, and other emblems of Mexico and the desert southwest. Again, every glance in any direction was a beautiful distraction
As I think back to my brother’s short, painful, beautiful visit, I am reminded of all the times I have been carried by humor and beauty. Adrian and I had an epiphany about ourselves during one of our conversations as we researched our genealogy together. My brother is an eternal optimist, with an uncanny ability to find humor and positivity in just about any situation. Sure, he’s had his own share of intense struggles and heartbreaks, but in general, he is a happy person who constantly sees the bright side of things. Meanwhile, I’m constantly enraptured by the sacred beauty and mystery of the world. To him, everything is amazing. To me, everything is holy.
This is in stark contrast to our parents. My dad complains about almost everything, and for his entire life — except that ten year stretch of being medicated and in therapy — he has met each day with a sense of struggle and negativity. He could never keep a job when my brother and I were kids, because some person or situation would piss him off, and then he would quit in a huff, which would plunge us into poverty. This would only add to his tendency toward shame, negativity, and the idea that “the world just sucks.”
My mom, meanwhile, was a victim of the “Satanic panic” of the 80s, and shehad a habit of burning books and records, and destroying toys or artworks she thought were evil. She warned us about the dangers of satanism and false idols, and said demonic forces were constantly on the prowl. Our neighbor in our trailer park had a subscription to one of those services that sent records every month, and my mom would take them before our neighbor could so she could burn them to counteract what she believed were occult messages or satanic lyrics. We listened to a Christian radio program that hosted live exorcisms. To my mom, the world was full of evil and danger.
And yet here was my brother finding the positive in every situation, and me seeing the divine all around us.
We had a good laugh about that, but I think it might be why we are both so resilient even though we’ve both faced numerous tragedies and losses in our lives. Just like Viktor Frankl gained the will to live through finding meaning, my brother is strong because of his natural orientation to humor and fun, while I find great strength in connecting to the sacred even in the mundane.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and in my Everyday Divinas practice this week, I keep seeing how this is true.
Last night we hosted a friend for dinner. She is also in an intense period of struggle. She’s in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. Her mother has very early and aggressive dementia and had to be put into professional care. Her brother is currently homeless and mentally ill. Her sister was fired for having alcohol at work. Her heart has been broken in just about every way possible in the last several months.
When she came over, she wanted to go for a walk. As we made our way to the University campus, even as she was telling us about something that brought her to tears of grief, she suddenly looked behind us and saw the sunset starting to pain the clouds pink. “Look, look, look!” she cried with a sense of urgent awe. “Isn’t that beautiful?”
In that moment, all of her crushing grief transformed into rapture at the splendor of a painted sky.
As we continued to walk, she continued to catch us up on all the myriad losses she’d faced since we last saw her a few months ago. It was sad, but each moment of sad recollection got punctuated by a bird, by the sunlight glinting off a newly-built glass-encased building on campus, by a memory of a musical performance we’d seen in one of the school’s venues, or again by the shifting sky. At one point, the sliver of the moon was visible even though the sun was still setting, and I mentioned how I’d noticed it on the start of Ramadan a few days ago. This sent her into giggle fits as she noticed that it looked like a fingernail clipping. The breeze caressed us as the temperature started to drop, and we made our way home happy. Then we shared a beautiful meal.
Our evening, so full of glimmering beautiful moments, was like an island sanctuary in her sea of pain. It doesn’t change any of the challenges she is facing, but it does change her ability to face them because every one of those moments is a link to something bigger than herself — evidence that no matter how hard life is right now, there is always, always, always something waiting nearby to comfort her, to connect, to distract her with a healing moment of grace.
For one of my Divina practices this week, I returned to the beginning of a book I’ve been savoring over the past few weeks. In the opening for Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett writes:
I curl up in the mosses as wind bashes into bark, grass, heart – gusts around the parts that we forget to fill. And it is so convincing, this battering, that we forget that there was ever anything else. We forget that there are stars. We forget luminosity. We forget that a body could be for more than weathering.
Though the one I loved has gone, there are echoes. Reverberations that stay, as a note, throbs after it’s sounded. There are gestures, little mirrors, in people I pass, in clouds, in grass. Little tremors of what he is now, without a body. At first, I watch secretly. I do not want sadness to see. I want it to believe it still has all of me. But as body brushes field – the ground we shared while he lived – there is a release . Even in ice there is potential to crease. Even in wind, the rumor of wings.
Oh, how I love this book. The whole thing is written like that, and it becomes, in and of itself, one of these beautiful distractions. When I start to feel the pressure of my life these days, I can get lost in something beautiful, so I’ve made a little ritual of reading a few pages of this book each night before bed. It has been a great reframing.
Perhaps because of my attention to this book, which details the way the natural world (and specifically moss) helped the author navigate grief, I found myself delighted by a curious synchrony as I stumbled across another passage about moss in another Everyday Divina practice this week. A friend shared a quote with me, and in looking for its source I discovered an excerpt from Eden Phillpotts’ 1919 book, A Shadow Passes.
In the marshes the buckbean has lifted its feathery mist of flower spikes above the bed of trefoil leaves. The fimbriated flowers are a miracle of workmanship and every blossom exhibits an exquisite disorder of ragged petals finer than lace. But one needs a lens to judge of their beauty: it lies hidden from the power of our eyes, and menyanthes [buckbean] must have bloomed and passed a million times before there came any to perceive and salute her loveliness. The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Inspired by this, I decided to intentionally look up close at things, to see textures, to notice details — to lose myself in the appreciation of the minute wonders hidden all around us.
The first thing to take my breath away was the texture and light shining through Norwegian linen as I steamed it. I just couldn’t believe the tiny universe of beauty in all the hand-stitched seams and patterns. Even the texture of the loomed linen was beautiful in its own right, as was the quality of light shining through, highlighting the embroidery. Amazing.
On another day I marveled at bees drinking from my fountain, so peaceful, their tiny wings like flat jewels glistening in the sun. And speaking of jewels, I noticed the sun making rainbows inside a quartz sphere sitting by the window, so it took it outside to see what happened in full sunlight. It was incredible the way the sun filled the stone’s impurities with dazzling bursts of color that sparkled as I moved it.
Today I noticed that the wind had scattered petals from my almond blossoms all over the front yard like a little snow flurry, and that the interior of each blossom was hot pink! I looked at the way the sunlight shone through tissue-thin new red leaves coming out of rose bushes. I discovered that the year’s first yerba mansa blooms are about to unfurl, and that the white flowers come wrapped in swirls of soft pink before they bloom — something I’d never noticed in my ten years of growing them under the fountain. Again and again I noticed some new and surprising beauty — and all of it served as a lovely and life-giving distraction from the heaviness I’d been experiencing. Looking closely was teaching me how to notice all the “magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
And then I realized that I could do this for my dad too.
Yes, he’s a relapsed alcoholic who hates his life. And he’s also my dad. And he’s still here. And I still love him. I love his stories. I love cooking for him, even when he doesn’t appreciate it. I love that I still get to see him, that he still answers my calls, even though I wish I didn’t have to initiate every phone call. I love that despite his dark and enveloping mental illness, he still has some of the best jokes, and he laughs at my jokes as well. I can recognize the inherent sacred dignity he has in simply being alive. And at the end of the day, even though it’s unlikely he will ever go back to the way he was during that magical ten years when he was doing so well, at least my brother and I had that wonderful decade. And for that, I am deeply, deeply grateful.
The same is true for life in general. We don’t have to look very far for things to bring us down or highlight what is wrong with the world. But thankfully we can train our wits to look more closely at the beauty that is also just as ubiquitous — it’s just that we might have to make a conscious decision to do it. Even if we don’t take the time to notice it, it’s there, waiting patiently for us to have the sense to recognize all the miraculous treasures life affords.
It may be my natural inclination to see divinity in everything and recognize the sacred in the mundane, but optimism is a different muscle I am learning to flex. My life’s mantra used to be to be Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for living a life:”
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Well, perhaps I’m learning that paying attention isn’t enough. I’m often astonished at what I pay attention to, from war to injustice to environmental devastation, and I can’t maintain my own emotional and spiritual health if that’s all I regard. And in today’s “attention economy,” those kinds of things are constantly vying for my awareness.
The bees collecting bright pollen from the nectar-filled flower cups in my alleyway, however, have no PR agent. My quartz sphere doesn’t just come into my social media feed to delight me with its sudden flashing rainbows, and the almond-blossom snowflakes don’t take out promotional ads — nature has no algorithm engineered to grab my attention and hold it. So I have to evolve. I have to make a choice to look for those things, to examine them closely, whether the miraculous beauty waits to be discovered in nature, in an experience, in music, in a sunset, or in a broken, hurting, but still holy human. So let’s pay attention to the right things — and then get lost in the details of all that beauty.
Here are some photos from this week’s exercise in paying attention to these details. If you’d like me to feature one of yours here on Substack, send them to me via a direct message. I would love to see (and share) them!
I just love the idea of paying close attention to all this beauty and then sharing it with each other. And even if it isn’t something that can be captured in a photo, I’d love to hear about it, if you’re willing to share it. Yes, the world will continue to bring its heartbreak, but it will also continue to share its splendor. That’s life. That is this beautiful, meaningful, sacred, glorious life.
The Age of Enlightenment
What is light
If more than the absence of darkness?
Black is the absorption
Of all light
And so we fear it
As we fear being similarly consumed.
But light penetrates even our fears.
It cuts a bright sword slash
Through the dull dimness
To reveal,
To warm,
To nourish,
And
To expose —
And even burn away.
And so I’d wager
That just as many
Fear the light
As have terror for the night.
Yes, the exposing horrors of the day
Wait to seize upon us
Like a league of Templar knights,
Their piercing clarions
A battle cry for truth,
Their burnished silver shackles
Threatening to chain us
To our hypocrisy and shame —
Or worse,
To something we deserve.
And so we run back to the shadows
To hide.
To dim.
To disappear.
But just as darkness both looms
And shelters,
Light, gently, can warm us
So that we emerge
Into a different kind of safety;
That of being seen —
Truly,
For who we are —
And loved,
Despite the deep creases in our lives
That line our bodies in shadow
And blue-black bruises.
What good is a surgeon
Without an operating light,
Or a mirror
With nothing to reflect?
Like trees,
And moss,
And algae slimes,
We are creatures of the sun,
Unable to live forever
In hidden caves of safety.
We may need protection
At times
From the searing sunlight,
But we also need the Daystar’s lighter touch
To sustain us
Lest we become pale and brittle
In the many-shadowed crevices
We may call home.
Though they may be familiar,
Though we may have even
Claimed these dark places
As our birthright
Or birth defects,
We cannot stay there.
All of us
And our solar kin
Must have light —
Or die.
And I want to live.
I want to see light
Reflected on laplet waves
And refracted in crystal
That only shines
Once unearthed,
Holding within its heart a frozen rainbow,
Having waited eons
To be discovered
And treasured in my palm.
I want to feel
The sun-warmed grass
As it tickles my footsteps
With long soft fingers.
Even here in my living room
The old coffee table
Incandesces its warm wood grain
Under lamps and candlelight,
Each ring-stain, scratch, and watermark
A story of a living being
That shared a moment of their life with me.
I want to taste the sunlight
Captured in green things,
Tender on the tongue
And sugared red and blue and yellow
In nectar-laden fruit.
The pineapple spikes its golden spears
Through tastebuds
Just as orange and lemon
Invoke the sunrise in my body
With each drop
Of their glimmering tang.
Like a bee
Drawn to the contrast
Of purple and yellow blooms,
I too want to be captured
By the traps of floral beauty,
So caught by their enticement
That I stop
And lean in quickly,
And with a gasp,
Inhale their bright fragrance
So that it becomes a perfume
In my blood,
And the quickening
Of my romance with the earth.
I want each tiny cloud of steam
Rising from my cup
To tease the sun
With gentle whispers
Of distant lands
Where high mountains
Rise above the clouds
To offer up their verdant peaks,
Turning sunlight into flavor
And awakeness.
Is it any wonder
That the Age of Enlightenment
Arrived on those merchant ships
Along with crates of tea?
How many ways
Does light sustain us?
How many chapels
Does it build within our lives,
Illuminating all
Within and without
With stained glass bombast
So that we too become a jewel,
Brilliant in having been cut
And made more lovely
By impurities
That turn a colorless stone
Into a gem of fire?
And what of light from flames
That burn away the choking undergrowth?
I have seen grand and terrifying fires
That consume entire forests,
And I have seen the astonishment of growth
That always
Always
Comes just after.
Even the laser
Can kill
Or blind
Or cure
And can even paint the night
With an artist’s dancing vision.
So
Great spirit of the sun
Expose me
As I step into your light.
Have your way
As you have always done,
Ageless
And aging agent,
Great Father of us all
Who gives us daily life.
I love you,
Eric