First Light and Flotsam

First Light
Laura Duguay

Have you ever lain awake waiting for dawn to break?  Waiting for that first light to make it to the corner of your being?  It can be an unsettling feeling... wondering if the dawn will come... wondering if the sun will break its way through the clouds of doubt and despair.

I've known a few such mornings in my life... and my response has alway been the same: get up and get going.  My attitude is I believe similar to that of Anne Lammott who writes:

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up.

Just show up.

Bring your best self.

Do the right thing.

Dawn will come... and it may come from within... for as another one of my heroes, Carrie Newcomer shared on her Facebook page this morning:

There is a light within you,
Quiet and luminous,
Resting and restless,
Abiding in the secret.
It is what opens our hearts to encounters of beauty,
It is what leans with us toward possibility,
It is how we recognize love,
In all it's unexpected forms.

It was this liminal luminous light that moved me to sit on the deck this morning and listen to the sound of time rushing on the brook outside my window.  As I listened I could hear the minutes, hours and days pass in swirls, still pools and rapids of movement... knowing, that like the water in this river, this moment once past is forever gone...

I took a few moments and ventured closer to the waters edge, mesmerized by the urgency with which the river moved, its strength of forward motion echoing off the of the surrounding steep hillsides... and there I glimpsed two small seedlings, flotsam themselves, caught in a tangle of small branches and leaves spinning in a quiet eddy.

And I wondered...

Where will the river of time carry the flotsam of the living and dead?  Will those two seedlings find good soil to put down roots?  Will they grow together or be carried apart?  Will they be able to cast off the debris in which they are entangled?  Or might that debris contribute to their finding root?

"There is a light within you... It is what opens our heart to encounters of beauty..."

I am so thankful for the light that is within me... a light that I am coming to know and enjoy more fully... and for the beauty it helps me to see and the questions it allows me to ask...

...on the Sabbath Road...