Today the sun is aimed at a rare angle on the western horizon, shooting all the way through the narrow window across my dining room into the galley kitchen, and landing on the counter with the wide, flat bowls on top of the microwave. The bowls are empty. No bread and ripening fruit.
One bowl is painted with a pair of country rabbits and the other’s glazed with maroon and blue iris with a serrated chip in the edge. I don’t want to throw it out and replace it; it has sentimental value because my dear friend Vicki gave it to me years ago.
The bowls are overflowing with light. The sun only finds that corner for a few days of the entire year, and for few minutes in these days. That’s it. I want to pay attention so much to this life that when the elusive light comes to my ordinary home, I stop and dip myself in it.
Just as the poet Rumi declares, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” During those two years of pain, and the seventeen holes in my body, I hung on to that idea of light getting inside me. This changed me, permanently, into a devotee of light. In the time it took to write this down and describe it, the corner of the kitchen is gray again.
The bowls hold shadows.
Nothing lasts. Except—except the desire for a love everlasting, for love everlasting, for everlasting love.
Wisdom from the Psalms
David wrote half of the psalms, and his poems are often inclusive of the challenges of the physical body: being sick, getting wounded, aging.
“Yet you heard my voice, my cry for mercy, when I pleaded with you for help” (Ps 31:23).
Take a moment today and reflect on how God’s light has been there for you or your loved ones during these times of distress.
