Most mornings I sit in my bedroom chair beside the window to meditate immediately after I put on my clothes for the day. I’ve learned that if I don’t sit to meditate right away, I probably won’t take the time to sit and meditate later either.
But sometimes the
Morning Light
delights me so much that I get up out of my meditation chair and find my camera so that I can make a photograph of what I see out my window. This morning was one of those mornings. With the snow covered trees across the pond a tint of pinky yellow light with pale blue morning sky I was mesmerized by the beauty of the world—again!
This delight that I find in looking at the world is one of the reasons I am so grateful that I fell in love with photography. I don’t remember being seduced by the morning light like this before I began paying such close attention to the beauty of the world.
The beauty I’ve marveled at on recent mornings reminds me of these lines scribed by Mary Oliver
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.
— Mary Oliver, Red Bird
What a gift our lives and the beauty of this world are. As we experience the affects of climate change and worry about what will happen in the future, let us remember to be grateful for the beauty and wonder of little things like beautiful morning light.
A Different Kind of Inspiration
Last night I finished reading the book, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad. (I talked about the book in a previous blog post here.) Reading this book wasn’t easy but life isn’t easy either. Suleika’s diagnosis of leukemia shortly after her graduation from college and her marathon of 4 years of chemo, bone marrow transplant, and living with the life-long affects of the treatments she received is not easy to read about. But the wisdom she gained through the process and the way that she slowly picked up the pieces of her forever changed life inspired me. None of us travel through life without losses and disappointments. Learning to continue to savor life through the full catastrophe is a great gift.
Here are two passages that spoke deeply to me.
As we live longer and longer, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth across these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere in between. These are the terms of our existence. The idea of striving for some beautiful state of wellness? It mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach.
To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.
― Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
What if I stopped thinking of pain as something that needs to be numbed, fixed, dodged, and protected against? What if I tried to honor its presence in my body, to welcome it into the presence.
I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works.
Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Katherine’s experience and her insight sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive and yet here she is, surviving. “You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”
― Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
Wise words indeed!
May you walk in beauty.
Note: Photos in this post are my early morning photos made today.
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