“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being. - Hafiz”
It's December 31, 2019. Appropriately, I'm in an airport, just as I've been in airports so, so very frequently this year. I've been sick and dark since Christmas Eve. Im trying not to cough and see a bright spot of light on the delta desk. I can't find where it's coming from. We feel miles away from windows. I look up and up and only see the fake lights in their round ceiling holes. But the light on the delta desk is not fake. The light grabbing that baby's cheek as his mother struggles to check his car seat, is as natural as all the light my cheeks have sought-- have fought for really, this year. The light, as it always does, surprises and delights me. How did it make it's way here, to hold this baby, when it's mother cannot, to make me wonder at its source, it's constant ability to curve and cut through spaces in one hot honey move toward a feeling resembling hope and the best parts of a laugh?
Finally I find it. Past lines of tsa pre check and "all gates this way," signs, there is one corner of a tall, mostly obscured window-- there is that rascal of a sun, wrapped around an edge I didn't think she could wrap. I tend to underestimate her. I turn my face toward her for the ____(number of times i wish i had some way of counting) this year, and close my eyes. "You've found me again, in an impossible moment." I say thank you. I cry.
"The light says I love you," I think. The phrase that was the song of my year. The reminder that was at the bottom of every bowl of broken heart. The sock I thought I lost in the grief pile of Laundary.
My wish for you today and always is so simple:
May the light keep finding you.
In all your dark places. In moments when you've forgotten the sun and warmth as concepts, let alone things that exist. May the light find you in your lonely, long hours. May it remind you of love. The love that you may mistakenly seek elsewhere but actually ARE---right now, even through the cold pauses and starts you gasp through.
May the light keep finding you. But even MORE IMPORTANT than that, may you notice when she does. May you turn to her, pause to touch your forehead to hers, absorb her ancient illumination, share with her your prayer that we treat the earth in a way she and we can sustain.
May the light keep finding you. And if you come too near it's burn, may you be prepared with shade. May you have protectors from the sometimes surreal seer of its bright proclivities. May it help you remember the universal need for dark, the heart's whole thirst for seasons.
Will you do me one favor? Will you keep reminding me of this fundamental truth in 2020? I'll do my best to remind you too. I think a lot of life is about passing the same truths back and forth. Friends helping one another remember, when our human hearts inevitably forget. That in order to illuminate, light, must find darkness to touch.
Yours,
Yan
